Design Brief The Commercial Strip
The development of commercial zones along traffic corridors within the last five decades has typically resulted in areas of dispersed buildings amid large areas of parking. Their lack of relationship with each other has resulted in a loss of urbanity, their expanse and exclusive catering to vehicle traffic has discouraged pedestrian or bicycle access. The situation to the south of the Trans Canada Highway is an example. Re-urbanisation It is impossible to restore a neighbourhood to a more urban ambience through a single development, but it can aspire to be a catalyst for urban life to develop and to raise the bar for subsequent developments in the area. This is the strategy of this project: street wall : The first step toward urbanity is to introduce a street wall along 11th Avenue, creating a clear separation between the highway ambience and the more intimate interior of the project. boulevard and sidewalk : To accompany the street wall, to signal its importance, and to invite pedestrian/cyclists’ use we propose planting a formal row of trees. A sidewalk between boulevard and building further enhances the desired pedestrian-friendly and urban ambience. parallel parking: Parallel parking along the street edge is a powerful urban feature. It looks like a downtown street, the lure to get one of those limited spots attracts users, the activity of parking and leaving vehicles slows down traffic: it reminds us that this is a place where people come to stop, not a race track to be put behind us. containing spaces: The principle of the street wall is carried inside the development. The idea is to contain and define streetscapes and plazas of urban aspect, not disjointed volumes. village street, not parking lot : Until we return to more pedestrian-oriented development models it will be difficult to achieve the number of parking stalls required by regulations and function without resorting to large, coherent parking lots. Still, an effort is made to create more of a village street than the featureless expanse of blacktop typical of shopping centres. The need to keep roads within usable grades for parking offers a great opportunity to create the long switchback, with parallel parking along shop fronts, at the east side of the development. a supermarket without a back wall: The severe drop of the land made it necessary to orient the supermarket’s entrance to the interior of the property, where adequate parking can be developed without building expensive, ugly, and high retaining walls and vehicle ramps. The dilemma of having the supermarket turn its back to 11th Avenue was solved by turning it into another ‘front’: a large glazed clerestory with fixed sun shades forms the curved sweep of the Street Wall along sidewalk and boulevard. It lets daylight into the store to highlight attractive areas and creates an alluring ambience of transparency when viewed from the Trans Canada Highway. The space between supermarket and office building housing the Credit Union is developed into a tight urban plaza at the bottom of landscape stairs similar to those at Robson Square in Vancouver. –
Already in construction the building lets the street wall be the front, rather than a large parking lot with a box at the other end.
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allen + maurer architects
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