Presented by StorefrontMB and The Forks, Manitoba’s Cool Gardens celebrates the interface between nature, art, urbanism and design. The exhibition has run in Winnipeg for the past four years, with 2018 marking its sixth anniversary. The registration deadline for the Call for Submissions is on December 21, with a submission deadline of January 15.
The event is highly accessible to a broad audience including children, tourists, shoppers, cyclists, and business people. Mirroring Winnipeg’s internationally acclaimed Warming Huts Exhibition on Ice, Cool Gardens places design culture at the centre of summer activities in Winnipeg and Brandon, while offering pleasant relief from summer’s exasperations.
In Winnipeg, installations will run from Main Street to Provencher Boulevard, highlighting this generally unrecognized pedestrian linkage that bridges the Anglophone and Francophone communities. Installations along this axis provide an engaging, creative, and active experience for downtown Winnipeg. A satellite site in Brandon includes the Riverbank Discovery Centre.
Cool Gardens will take place from July 2nd to September 24th, 2018. In addition to the 3 new gardens selected by competition, Cool Gardens 2018 will include the re-commision of 5 previous gardens: Weave [Rachelle Kirouac, Danielle Loeb], BEND [Mark Boutin], Cure de Ville [ Janelle Tougas ], Cool Dots [ Ewa Tarsia ], and Le Rendez Vouz [ LaTourelle + Witthöft ].
While there is no overarching competition theme, entrants are expected to be responsive to the specificity of their selected site conditions, within the overall framework of cooling. Proponents may also wish to indicate how their garden would be feasible to re-mount in subsequent years. Winning proposals will be selected by the jury based on: creativity, originality, clarity, durability, provisions for barrier-free access, ease of fabrication and decommissioning, budget, interpretation of the site and cooling, safety, and most importantly, potential for public engagement.
This Call for Proposals is open to teams and individuals consisting of designers, architects, landscape architects, and / or artists. Individuals may be students, interns, or practitioners. Multiple submissions are permitted although a separate registration fee will be required for each submission. More information is available via the official Cool Gardens website, linked here.