Cool Gardens 2018

Description

Cool Gardens is a public exhibition of contemporary garden and art installations that offers a shift of sensation for the summer - cooling - as a general theme for public projects in Winnipeg’s downtown. Cool Gardens brings architects, landscape architects, designers, and the public together, celebrating the interface between urbanism, landscape and design. The competition will feature locally, nationally, and internationally acclaimed artists and practitioners in the Winnipeg and Brandon context, highlighting the value of art and design in public space.

GENERAL

Presented by StorefrontMB and The Forks, Cool Gardens celebrates the interface between nature, art, urbanism and design. The exhibition has run in Winnipeg for the past four years, with 2018 marking its sixth anniversary. Past presenters include BGL, SPMB, Scatliff+Miller+Murray, Ewa Tarsia, ATLRG, Micah Lexier and Claude Cormier [ providing a visiting garden from the Jardins de Métis ] HTFC, and Mark Boutin. The event is highly accessible to a broad audience including children, tourists, shoppers, cyclists, and business people.
Mirroring Winnipeg’s internationally acclaimed Warming Huts Exhibition on Ice, Cool Gardens places design culture at the centre of summer activities in Winnipeg and Brandon, while offering pleasant relief from summer’s exasperations. In Winnipeg, installations will run from Main Street to Provencher Boulevard, highlighting this generally unrecognized pedestrian linkage that bridges the Anglophone and Francophone communities. Installations along this axis provide an engaging, creative, and active experience for downtown Winnipeg. A satellite site in Brandon includes the Riverbank Discovery Centre. Cool Gardens will take place from July 2nd to September 24th, 2018. In addition to the 3 new gardens selected by competition, Cool Gardens 2018 will include the re-commision of 5 previous gardens: Weave [Rachelle Kirouac, Danielle Loeb], BEND [Mark Boutin], Cure de Ville [ Janelle Tougas ], Cool Dots [ Ewa Tarsia ], and Le Rendez Vouz [ LaTourelle + Witthöft ].

COMPETITION DESCRIPTION

CONCEPT

The Call for Entries 2018 seeks creative entries that prompt curiosity, play, and appreciation of urban spaces by highlighting the significance of nature, art, and design. Central to Cool Gardens is the idea that contemporary design can instigate participation in public spaces in interactive, critical, poetic, and meaningful ways. The intention of this emergent festival is to provoke questions about our public spaces and about the role of landscape architecture and design to give enhanced meaning and value to our urban culture. Cool Gardens thus animates our public spaces with a critical collection of experiences - expanding the idea of what a garden might be.
Cool Gardens expands the vocabulary of garden design and serves as a learning tool. As we go back to our boulevards and backyards we hope to spread the creativity of Cool Gardens to the everyday practice of gardening in our city and region, creating in the process a dialogue on contemporary design with our sister cities across Canada and the world.

EVALUATION CRITERIA

While there is no overarching competition theme, entrants are expected to be responsive to the specificity of their selected site conditions, within the overall framework of cooling. Proponents may also wish to indicate how their garden would be feasible to re-mount in subsequent years. Winning proposals will be selected by the jury based on: creativity, originality, clarity, durability, provisions for barrier-free access, ease of fabrication and decommissioning, budget, interpretation of the site and cooling, safety, and most importantly, potential for public engagement.

SITE INFORMATION

GENERAL SITE INFORMATION

Sites for the Cool Gardens loosely extend along an axis that includes The Forks, La Maison des Artistes grounds [ Provencher Boulevard ], and Main Street. While The Forks site serves as anchor and connector, the projects span and bridge [ both physically and metaphysically ] the Francophone and Anglophone districts of Winnipeg. A satellite site includes Brandon, MB.

2017 COMPETITION SITES

1. La Maison des Artistes
2. East of CMHR