We’ve achieved a new milestone. We entered a design competition in French, giving ideas for the beautification of a really ugly freeway in Montréal. No, we didn’t exactly clean up in the awards department. We may have been a bit, well, wild. Even though we didn’t play it safe, we did have a lot of fun.
A giant, hydralike freeway towering 100 meters into the sky over the freeway itself is probably not exactly mainstream. Not something that the typical Canadian traffic engineer dreams of instead of counting sheep as he nods off for the night. But it would have been really, really cool. Like the Sydney Opera House or the St. Louis Arch, it would have been a towering urban monument that nobody would forget. It would have created a topic of conversation for many years to come. Controversial, strange, dynamic… expensive. Yeah, but what price glory?
Maybe the dynamic lighting, virtual reality overlay to digital devices, giant bridge/park complete with a waterfall, back lit snowscapes, dynamic luminous concrete were a bit out there, too. I’ll regret not being able to drive into Montréal to a tune played by my car’s tires moving over computer-cut grooves in the pavement.
We even did a video. It was required for the competition. Hopefully you’ll find it amusing.
Les juges, quant à eux, n’ont pas trouvé ça très drôle, il faut le dire. Donc, nous n’irons pas à Montréal pour fêter nos accolades. Nous resterons ici, à Sacramento pour perfectionner nos recettes de fettucini Alfredo, cultiver nos plantes et faire nos dessins. Montréal, hélas, sera pour un autre jour.
We weren’t the only crazy people involved in this effort. There was an architect. An artist. Two landscape architects (us). Our entire team was crazy, frothing with out-of-the-box ideas and unbridled creativity. Just the thing not to throw at Canadian traffic engineers. I’m not mentioning anyone (unless they ask) since maybe they don’t want the entire planet to know what kinds of things they imagine when let loose. Our secret identities should be kept secret, shouldn’t they?