Urban Reef
John Hill
20. August 2014
Photo: Nick Milkovich Architects/Instagram
Urban Reef, the competition-winning design of Kaz Bremner, Jeremiah Deutscher, Michael Siy and Kenneth Navarra, has taken over one block of Vancouver's Robson Street with a curling sculpture that invites people to sit, relax and play.
We came across the summer installation on the Instagram page of Canadian-Architects member firm Nick Milkovich Architects; Milkovich served on the Robson Redux jury, which awarded the first place award to the Urban Reef team of local architects, designers and carpenters in April of this year. Urban Reef beat out nearly 80 other entries in the design-build competition sponsored by Viva Vancouver. They received a CAD$40,000 honorarium to build the installation that is in place until the end of the summer. In terms of what will happen with the materials later, the design-side of the team – intern architects Bremner and Deutscher – said in an interview at Spacing magazine: "This design is temporal, it’s only going to be at Robson Square for two months and then we’re going to repurpose it. Change is important because if things are stagnant people get bored."