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Please be advised: Slide Hill is temporarily closed for planned maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Please be advised: Slide Hill is temporarily closed for planned maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Wave of Jubilation

[cap­tion id=“attachment_2792” align=“aligncenter” width=“468” caption=“Children climb­ing on a WaveDeck designed by West 8 and DTAH. Image cour­tesy of West 8.”]West 8 performs feats of landscape architecture[/​caption]

Every­thing’s com­ing up tulips for West 8, the Dutch land­scape archi­tec­ture firm lead­ing the team to design the new park and pub­lic spaces on Gov­er­nors Island. Last mon­th’s Land­scape Archi­tec­ture Mag­a­zine (LAM) had a ter­rif­ic fea­ture detail­ing the com­ple­tion of their award-winnning wavedecks on the Toron­to water­front. And now they’ve sent us word that they’ve been short­list­ed for anoth­er water­front park design com­pe­ti­tion in Ottawa. And of course, there’s all that Olympic gold that has been turn­ing orange. . . WaveDecks What looked like artis­tic license in the orig­i­nal ren­der­ings are now fan­tas­ti­cal and fun gath­er­ing spaces where kids climb chal­leng­ing grades and grown-ups ( at least the ones who aren’t play­ing on the wood­en waves) can stop and rest. The LAM arti­cle also dis­cuss­es the chal­lenges the team faced and met cre­ative­ly in bring­ing their designs off the page and into the real world of uni­ver­sal acces­si­bil­i­ty and safe­ty stan­dards. This is a great exam­ple of how West 8 takes imag­i­na­tive ideas and turns them into real life fea­tures with­out los­ing the orig­i­nal design’s abil­i­ty to delight and inspire. 

[cap­tion id=“attachment_2797” align=“aligncenter” width=“468” caption=“Grown-ups and kayaks enjoy­ing the WaveDeck. Image cour­tesy of West 8.”][/​caption]