The Oval Pavilion Design / Friends of Halifax Common
Last night 30-40 people found the secret entrance to the Atlantica Hotel (the lobby is under renovation) and found the unmarked room where the new Oval Pavilion was being announced.
I started speed skating last winter and found myself showing up at the Oval 3 or 4 times a week before work, sometimes when it was -15°C, so I was interested to see what was being proposed both as a user of the site and as a municipal nerd/interested citizen.
DSRA Architects, a local firm, were hired by the city many months ago to consult with the public and produce a building design which would replace the slew of ugly temporary buildings that currently service the oval with change-rooms, lockers, skate rentals, bathrooms, a garage for the ice resurfacer, etc. This is undoubtedly a tough site to work with - there were a lot of needs and wants which need to be balanced with the desire to have a minimal footprint on the already overloaded North Commons.
Design principal Kevin Reid drew out the explanation of DSRA's process, talking about the results of the consultation and showing the project morphing from idea to diagram to model to final design.
Architects love this stuff.
See above - the design is subtle and simple. It's not going to blow anyone out of the water, but that wasn't its aim. It has a look that is warm and inviting, uses honest, durable materials (brick/glass/wood), seems to fit the specs provided and the footprint on the common is really quite minimal.
After the architect opened the floor for questions, the floor was quickly taken over by the Friends of the Halifax Common (FoHC) who were spread through the crowd asking questions largely having nothing to do with the design.
They did ask a few useful questions. One was about using the waste-heat from the chillers (the machines that keep the ice ice) to heat the building - a very good idea which seemed to be already in the works.
I felt kinship with another question: Beaver Tails is the only vendor on the site at the moment, in a kiosk, and I don't have to tell you that after 45min of speed-skating laps, eating something deep fried and sugar coated isn't appealing. What the Oval needs, in winter anyhow, is good coffee, and healthy, high-quality snacks. I agree that food trucks in designated spaces on Cogswell would work just fine, and it would have been nice for the city officials on-hand to say they were considering it. As it was, city officials said they were not planning for food service of any kind in the new Pavilion but were cagey about putting food trucks on Cogswell St. (i.e. municipal land).
Most questions had to do with other parts of the Oval site outside the mandate of the design. The FoHC seems against the Oval in principle, even if that facility has brought huge numbers of people to the Commons annually in winter, when the park had few users and few reasons to go there. Preambles to questions sounded staged (some sounding as if they were clipped from Wikipedia).
And you know what? I don't have to repeat their questions here, because all of them were suggested ahead of time, in this article on the Friends of Halifax Common website. It took me a while to decide why this is annoying: they asked questions that had nothing to do with the design at hand because they decided what those questions would be before the design had been revealed.
FoHC offered lots of criticism of the current site (much of it apt) but presented zero vision, and asked questions smugly and defensively and it didn't feel like an inviting space for an independent citizen to ask or comment.
I'm sure that I have plenty of opinions in common with FoHC but nothing they did last night endeared me to their organization.
I would like to say a belated kudos to DSRA for delivering a design that I think will fit the needs of Haligonians year-round, that looks good, and that doesn't take up any more of our precious land than necessary. If FoHC had taken a breath to look at the presentation, they might have found they liked it also.
And most importantly in this city: the building design isn't "fake old".
update: the remainder of the images can be seen at the Oval Open House site.