"The people will use it the way it was meant to be used." That was a line we uttered over the weekend as we watched the unveiling weekend of the Simcoe Wavedeck. We saw people swarm over the deck and use it well, that way, they see fit. Sliding, scaling, sitting, embracing.
We couldn't help but notice over the weekend that the deck, so prestintely launched on Friday, by Saturday and Sunday, in the midst of the 1000 Tastes of Toronto, had been nicely broken in. Dozens upon dozens were sitting on it noshing on gourmet street eats while children lined up and kept on sliding down the waves.
In one of the quotes below in a Toronto Star column by Chrisopher Hume, you'll see what could be an astonished architect who probably didn't have a playground in mind, probably helpful in that they designed railings that looked like a hazard to the hundreds we saw scale the highest waves.
Anyways, some of Hume's story here.
Technically speaking, this wooden structure, which rises and falls like an exquisite frozen wave, is a means of getting from one side of the Simcoe St. slip to the other. In fact, that's the least of its functions. Its real purpose is to be beautiful, and if not beautiful, elegant, engaging, entertaining, cool and ever so slightly loopy, qualities that have long been conspicuous in their absence on our poor long-exploited waterfront.
Snip.
What do you think? Playground? Art installation? Both?
"It's unbelievable," enthuses Rotterdam-based landscape architect Adriaan Geuze, whose firm, West 8, won an international design competition several years ago with Toronto's DTAH.
"I'm totally happy with it. From one point of view it seems so familiar. But it also inspires the child's mind within you. It took a very long time to figure out how to design it and build it. You're invited to come and play, but we didn't want to make it a playground.
"We wanted a serious moment of `Wow' and an identity for the waterfront. We had the idea of making it an amphitheatre-like space, a space that would attract children and adults."
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