Kaz Bremner and Jeremiah Deutscher are two young intern architects, and the design duo of a four-person team, that have won the inaugural Robson Redux design-build competition. Their design concept, Urban Reef, was selected from nearly 80 submissions, and will grace Vancouver’s Robson Square for two months during the summer.>!--break--> In this interview with Spacing Vancouver’s Liz Vossen, the pair talks about their process, inspiration, and hope for how Urban Reef will enrich one of Vancouver’s most prominent public spaces.
Spacing: What was the inspiration for the design and how did you arrive there?
K & J: The design brief called for celebrating urbanity. The major criterion was connectivity, which can be interpreted a number of ways. We observed Robson Square and the one thing that struck us was that the area was already an interesting urban hub: It has street performers, vendors, food trucks, and people gathering informally.
Our approach was to take what already happens at Robson Square and enable it to happen more functionally. The crux of our design was creating an armature that would both allow people to interact on a personal scale but also on the larger scale of the city block. For example, we were intentional about framing out spaces for performance to happen better, creating spaces to catch an audience.
Spacing: How does this design compare with projects you’ve designed in the past?
K & J: For the most part we design on a larger scale with projects such as academic buildings and institutional buildings. There are sometimes portions of those buildings that have a similar intent to this, like a four story academic building with a public plaza that calls for an interesting seating configuration, but that’s not the primary focus. We’re really excited about focusing all of our effort to designing something on a smaller scale.
For the rest of the interview by Liz Vossen in Spacing Vancouver, click here.