Petals in Perspective: FAUM second year students win Cool Gardens 2025 design competition
Four students from the Faculty of Architecture’s Environmental Design Program won Cool Gardens 2025 Design Competition – Gavin Buhler, Bayan Shaeri, Noah Shotton and Owen Tintor (PETAL design)
Cool Gardens is a local design competition that invites both local and international designers to come up with innovative and creative ways to draw people out and enjoy different points in the city. Officially opening on July 5th, the team’s design process began much earlier by visiting the site throughout the winter and researching how the adjacent gardens interacted with the knolls at various points in the year. One of the team members, Owen Tintor, had experience working in the park the year prior, bringing knowledge and an understanding of the site providing valuable insight especially during the wintery months.
A key factor for the installation’s tactility was to keep it at a relatively small and interactable scale, not something large and far away. These were inspirative ideas drawn from things like furniture and smaller scale items, as opposed to other large public art pieces.
The installation’s focus was on habitat fragmentation. The flowers represented in the installation are Manitoba’s native plant species, the Prairie Crocus, and the lesser-known endangered Western Spiderwort. Research shows that habitat fragmentation is one of the leading causes of species loss, so the petals are ‘fragmented’ into individual components, in an effort to highlight and bring light to this fact.
The parkgoer is then asked to navigate their way around the park, within the knolls, curiously engaging with the pieces, ultimately to find the points where the petals align to make the whole flower. The perspective art piece rests upon the knolls, and as the season progresses the grass around them will continue to grow, resembling the prairies that these flowers call home.
This project was made possible by the gracious and hospitable people at both StorefrontMB and Assiniboine Park. This project led the team to partner with StorefrontMB again as they had the amazing opportunity to work on a project for the opening of Portage and Main which was completed in early July. Winning the Cool Gardens competition has inspired the team to pursue more design work outside of school. Currently they are working on entering other design competitions, while also looking into the near future to release a line of household items.