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Team to Create New Walk of Fame
‘Forest of lights' will showcase Canadian celebrities
BY ANDREW VOWLES
In a meeting of stars and the northern lights, a design team including a U of G landscape architecture professor has won a competition to create a new Walk of Fame in Toronto's theatre district.
The team led by Toronto's pgm Design Associates topped 14 entries this summer with a project design whose light columns, illuminated walkways, video walls and trees will create a “forest of lights” intended to showcase more than 100 Canadian celebrities, including Karen Kain, Wayne Gretzky, Jim Carrey and William Hutt.
“We want to excite people and make an animated urban space,” says Prof. Nancy Pollock-Ellwand, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, who earned her BLA at U of G. Other members of “Team Northern Lights” are also Guelph grads, including pgm's principal, Pat Morello, and associates Andrew Anderson and Lori Ellis. Derek Wekers, BLA '97, helped in the project's early stages. Mansoor Ma, an expert in 3-D visualization techniques, completed a BLA here and is now a graduate student at U of G.
The team is now consulting on implementing the $5-million project, called Celebration Park, along a stretch of King Street West near Roy Thomson Hall and the Royal Alex and Princess of Wales theatres. The park is intended to remain prominent year-round, unlike the existing Walk of Fame — established in 1998 — whose Hollywood-style stars embedded in the sidewalk pavement were often snow-covered or generally went unnoticed by visitors.
The project will use varied lighting techniques and devices to evoke the atmospheric light show of Northern Canada, says Pollock- Ellwand. She expects the new one-hectare site will also encourage visitors to think about how the country's natural landscape and aurora borealis help define the Canadian identity.
What makes Canada distinctive? “It's probably the landscape,” says Pollock-Ellwand, whose recent work includes several projects in Canada's Arctic. In Nunavut, she has worked on interpretive designs for recreational trails in Uvajuq and participated in master planning for a whaling station at Kekerten. Currently, she is helping the territorial government develop conservation policies for cultural landscapes.
Her interest in cultural landscapes took her to Japan for three months earlier this year as a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo. There, she helped on a landscape restoration and conservation project in Ohmi-Hachiman, a community near Kyoto whose ancient canal system and merchant houses hark back to the city's historical role as a major Japanese trading centre. She also led a community effort to conserve a largely untouched historical neighbourhood in downtown Tokyo.
The trip was Pollock-Ellwand's second extended stay in Japan, where she had worked as an architect with Shimizu Corp. in Tokyo in the 1980s. She returned to Canada to join U of G, bringing back her research and design interests to the country that the Japanese — perhaps fittingly for Pollock-Ellwand — call “Big Nature.”