Office Frayne Vajda

STRAWBERRY HILL

While at first the work appears rather uniform and arranged on a grid, a closer look reveals subtle differentiation across the stelae. In close consultation with the Japanese Canadian community groups, including the Surrey Japanese Canadian Network, we propose to layer specific details from life in Strawberry Hill. These could be family names, occupations, and textures and patterns from home and work, for example. There is a rich archive that documents life in Strawberry Hill and the injustices faced by Japanese Canadians. We propose that these everyday moments are a significant inclusion in any artwork that seeks to honour the memories and stories of Strawberry Hill. As such, our concept for R.A. Nicholson Park is a space of adjacent and overlapping times, stories, memories, and program that is strengthened by co-developing the artwork concept with the Surrey Japanese Canadian community. This concept is both interactive and contemplative, an artwork anchored in its history and oriented towards a shared future.

BRONSON CHANNEL LANDS

The Bronson Channel Lands sit at a confluence of orientations, axes, histories, and possibilities. This proposal respectfully welcomes the plurality of contexts into the site, a gesture of inclusivity and unity. Rather than transplant a single voice or directionality, at its core is an open and fluid ground plane than mediates between local activity and symbolic contextual layering of the Capital Experience. By using a multi-oriented set of grids to drive the urban design, this site is constantly enclosing and expanding. This deliberately invites the visitor to become aware of their surroundings and their relationship to the ground, nature, activity, the river, and each other.

Ultimately, this design invokes the Capital’s overlapping and intricate pasts to imagine connected and bright futures for all. Omni-directional, with no front or back, this is a porous design that ushers in the adjacent presences of the city, Canada’s capital.

SEND RECEIVE ALL

As part of a series of three mini-artworks, these tell a story of origin, destination, and the spaces in between us. The first artwork is a powder-coated aluminium screen. The perforated, modular panels and welded fins evoke the mail pigeonholes of the adjacent federal post office. The colour is air mail blue but also reminds us of the expansive prairie skies. The perforated loading bay screen manifests the movement and shapes of folding letters, envelopes, and parcels to create an active pedestrian experience that is enhanced by the changing light of the sun and season.

INTIMATE DISTANCE

Intimate Distance seeks to interpret and express the overlooked perceptual and social phenomenon of high speed train travel by creating an experience that captures the intriguing and shifting ways that we perceive near and far objects, and each other, when travelling on mass transportation. Commissioned for TransLink at the new Brentwood Skytrain station in Metro Vancouver. Oliver designed and oversaw all aspects of the project from concept development to shop drawings while at JAS.

4 ACTS: PORTALES

4 Acts: Portales is a threshold device that reorients residents and visitors to the beauty of what Plaza Trevijano already gives life to – sitting, waiting, reading, talking, performing, laughing, playing. Each of the four passages have a double life as a room in the city. Theatre curtains define a proscenium to be activated by Logroñés, revealing the plaza as the backdrop. Every surface of the installation can be drawn and written upon; a love letter to the plaza inscribed. The design co-exists with Plaza Trevijano, tenderly guiding it from its past life into an unknown of potentials.

580 BLOCKS

This installation at Woodbine Beach 8 welcomes visitors to play, interact, and imagine. An interplay between sunlight and glass, the work is a conversation on the radiance that exists within and between us, and how we can be connected and feel comfort, even at a distance. Glass, both a derivative of the beach sand and a visual relative of glittering ice and water, is arranged in a family. Akin to looking through a frosty winter window, the bricks evoke a sense of magic and dynamic movement. The spaces are like rooms, each unique, and can be inhabited, distorting the views of the environment beyond. These glittering beach jewels are both objects and spaces - for observing, mingling through, or exploring within, amplifying our own radiances.

DETOUR TRAVELLING PARKLET - 1ST PLACE

This competition winner highlights the complexity that can be generated through careful, economical design that mobilizes the spirit and imagination of our city’s neighbourhoods. It is within the space between and around the double wall that the community contributes their own garden pot. This collection of flowers, herbs, and shrubs not only delineates the parklet buffer with a soft planted edge, it also is a spontaneous display of community collaboration and neighbourliness.

A PASSING AND A PAUSE

We often switch off while waiting for the elevator, on a sort of autopilot. Until the doors open and you are confronted with a group of strangers, some one you were trying to avoid, and so on. The elevator as a space presents opportunities for exploring a highly standardized, everyday space as it relates to sociability and physical presence of bodies in a small space.Through discussion and model exploration, we discovered that both butter and the elevator share a similar characteristic of awkwardness, derived from psychological and physiological consequences of engaging with either. Our concept was to enhance this through the transformation of the space.