" Dreaming of the waterfront in black and white or in color? "
by Jean-Pierre Chupin, published
These two competitions, one for the Bassin Louise in Quebec City, the other for the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal in Toronto, are separated by three decades of design thinking on waterfronts. We offer a comparison that will appear somewhat unbalanced, however, since no less than seventy-five proposals were submitted in Quebec City in 1984 and only five in Toronto in 2014. People talked a lot about the relationship between public spaces and private financing in 1984, they talk more frankly about inclusive spaces and user expectations in 2014. The black-and-white ink drawings with rare perspectives for the Louise Basin are also a testament to a time, not so long ago, when we were betting big on a few sketches that the jury had to figure out how to interpret. It is not certain that today's students would still be able to read such "to scale" drawings, since the question of scale remains at the heart of urban landscape issues. To be convinced of this, you just have to open these competitions in two windows of your browser and appreciate the overflow of didactic, realistic and colorful visual representations that it is important today to provide to competition juries. To your bathing suits! [...] more
