A Place to Celebrate the Spirit of Giving and Sharing

Location: Quadra Island, Vancouver, BC

2019

Phase: Concept Design

Collabrator: Mengen Xu

Quadra Island is a place with abundant natural resources. Same as some other islands and BC rural area, Quadra Island has its traditional industries such as Fisheries, forestry, and cannery. First Nation depends on nature to live. Thus “to give” became the way to celebrate and be thankful for nature. The Potlatch is the festival of the community to be together and giving. The gift-giving feast practiced by Indigenous peoples also became the traditional primary economic system. Similarly, the current community on Quadra Island frequently hold parties to come together and eat and celebrate festivals or hold ceremonies, which gives a closer relationship between community members. Apart from fishers, wood choppers, and traditional manufacture, the community members on Quadra also has artists and musicians, scientists, high professional bike makers, coffer bakers.

Therefore, for this design, we prepare a new public assembly place for all the community members to share and celebrate and continue the Potlatch culture on the Island. Rather than put this culture space in the central commercial area, we prefer to set the design as a destination at the South end of Quadra, where the view of the sea, the canopy of fir, the seasonal color of grassland plants come together. Surrounded by the beauty of the island nature and having harvestable soil, such destination has the potential of encouraging people to celebrate the spirit of giving and sharing.

The abundant nature resource and its cliff-edge location provides not only a spiritual celebration, but also light changing experience on site. With different density, species and age of canopy, the light condition differs dramatically while walking from forest to the open field. The sudden drop at cliff also offers gorgeous and poetry views toward the sea.

Locates at 50N latitude, sunrise and sunset time and angle on Quadra differs dramatically in different season, making the south end of the island even a more perfect place to enjoy the changes of natural light. The same spot might have a totally different feeling in summer and winter, even in the morning and afternoon of a same day. Such dynamic light condition is one of the best charms of  rural area that could help us to further activate the site. Thus instead of putting everything together, we scattered the structures at the forest edge and cliff edge, where the light experience are most dynamic.

The wooden structures are not only appreciating natural light. We carefully studied different activities as potential programs of celebrating the “potlatch” spirit and designed the structures into different scales. Forest classrooms for artists, craftsmen and children to share knowledge and techniques; ceremonial hall for families and small groups to enjoy a great weekend; central hall for all friends in the community to have a potluck dinner together… We want them to be at proper locations and sizes for the island residents to host their own “festivals”. May the guest be tourists in summer or their friends in winter, the site should be able to provide the best miniature of the nature and culture on Quadra. In order to make the best use of the site, we also looked closely into how to light up the night on site. While we don’t want people to fall down on a dark path on their way to dinner with food in their hands, we still want to provide people with the romantic galaxy at night. The site is designed to have only one linear lighting along the central spine. With its sunken topo, we are able to keep most of the exterior areas dark enough to appreciate the moonlight, stars and sparkling waves.