Next in the series of proposals for the City Centre Airport Redevelopment is the design put forward by KCAP Architects & Planners of Rotterdam, Netherlands. They have the most irritating website I’ve seen in years and if you want to play with the browser-based equivalent of a Rubik’s cube then go try to view their portfolio.

Let’s just look at their design:

Overview of KCAP proposal. Click for large version.

Like the Foster + Partners design, the proposal calls for one large park running diagonally across the site. In KCAP’s design the northwest portion of the park is a parklands area and the southeast portion is a canal-esque area with buildings right at the water’s edge. Unlike the Foster + Partners design, KCAP has seen fit to actually provide some detail beyond “there will be five neighbourhoods, I guess.” They call these areas Kingsway, Central, NAIT, Yellowhead, and Runway Park.

KCAP proposal's neighbourhood and integration into surroundings.

The Kingsway and NAIT neighbourhoods extend beyond the borders of the ECCA grounds to include the existing Kingsway businesses and an expansion for NAIT, respectively. The Central area is the highest density, where vehicle traffic will be restricted. The Yellowhead area is lower density family housing, with an LRT station in the centre. This LRT station will have a number of businesses and a public square nearby. The Runway Park neighbourhood also has family housing in addition to a number of larger apartment buildings overlooking the park. A heating plant and an agricultural centre would be located in this area.

The agricultural centre and greenhouse ensure the design's science fiction quota is met.

This proposal has a number of strengths. It proposes a number of distinct neighbourhoods that each have a different use case in mind, so the development should appeal to many different people. There is a good deal of park space, again with a variety of uses in mind—one end is dense waterfront, and the other is open soccer fields and green spaces. It does an excellent job of integrating with the surrounding areas, bringing them into the design. Go look at that diagram at the top of the page, and see if you can tell where the borders of the ECCA lands are.

Welcome to Port Edmonton.

All of that sounds great, but there’s some things that are just too baffling to overlook.

First, Edmonton is not a coastal city, and this canal area strongly resembles something you’d see in Vancouver or, I don’t know, Rotterdam. The designers’ coastal sensibilities are showing here, and it just doesn’t seem quite right for a landlocked prairie city. There’s also the added cost to make the buildings and sidewalks suitable for the waterfront, in addition to the cost of the canal itself. Talking to Phil Sande, the City Centre Redevelopment’s executive director, made it clear that the economics of this project may demand phasing in development, and the upfront cost of building the canal and those seven bridges may be too much to bear.

What?

Second, what is up with the floatplanes? In the video, a yellow floatplane is seen flying over the development and landing in the canal, which I figured may have been just a metaphorical device for showing off the design from the air. Then I notice a fleet of yellow floatplanes in a photo on one of the display boards, so I’m going to take them literally here.

What is this even about? This must be more of the designers’ coastal sensibilities spilling over. Where would these planes take you to? Are you honestly thinking regulations will allow you to land a plane in a hundred-meter-wide canal that runs through a densely populated area full of high rise buildings? NO. STRONGLY DISAGREE. REJECTED STAMP.

Wind turbines?

Lastly, the design renderings show a bunch of wind turbines on the north part of the development. Why is this a terrible idea? Why not count the ways:

• Noise
• Some people don’t like how they look
• Not enough wind
• This video
• Flickering shadows cast on nearby buildings
• Floatplane catastrophes

Don’t think I’m a wind turbine hater. It’s just that they belong in farmer’s fields, not densely populated urban areas.

Let us know what you think in the comments, and come back later for a look at the proposal by Vancouver’s Perkins + Will.