Scale 3: the Group of Buildings The spaces between the buildings are linear parks that link the city to the lake. Behind the apartment buildings, the addition of parking garages sunk into the hillside liberates the site from the dominance of the parking lot and creates a useable rear lane. The garages can serve as workshop space for the tenants or for small businesses. The mechanical rooms have been sunk into the ground and link the buildings across the site, allowing for future district energy systems.
Park space between buildings, a diverse streetscape and back lanes with garages and gardens
Scale 4: the Site The design of the entire site is a culmination of small moves within an overall framework consisting of systems that run across the site and thresholds that link the site to the neighbourhood and the lake. Parks at the perimeter of the site invite the public in and can be used by outside community groups. This flexibility in use and shifting appropriation holds the seeds for resilience at a neighbourhood scale.
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above: the diversity of the lake edge and the system of public access across the site
Although the resilient city trends toward relative stability, its form is not static. Fluctuations ... as in natural ones, are to be expected, cannot be entirely controlled, and, in many instances, are positive. 1
Diversity and complexity have been recognised as positive characteristics of resilient, healthy cities. These characteristics accrue over time rather than through large-scale demolition and reconstruction. As explored in the Lakefront Apartments, a series of small, cumulative design moves can generate an overall framework that will adapt to the needs of changing populations for a healthy, liveable neighbourhood. c
1 Hester, Randolph. Design for Ecological Democracy . Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010
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