pedestrians

The York Street Millennium Fountain in Canada’s capital city is a modest marvel, a compact monument that says something about the city’s history and urbanity in ways that something grander perhaps never could have done. But the scale of the fountain is the only thing ‘small’ about the project, recalls landscape architect John Altorio, who found the work of balancing national- and local-government interests to be a challenge indeed.

A Modest Monument

A watershape doesn't need to be immense to be either beautiful or monumental. Nor does it need to be outsized to serve its community as a gathering place or point of pride. Those are a couple of the lessons we learned in shaping the York Street Millennium Fountain in the heart of one of the highest profile tourist areas of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Using an inventive approach that balanced the needs of the neighborhood, a range of national and local government officials and the general citizenry's desire to celebrate the new millennium, the project also embraced the city's own rich history. The new fountain sits at a significant crossroads of pedestrian traffic between the Byward Market and the government district in downtown Ottawa. Indeed, the traffic island surrounding the fountain stands just blocks from Parliament Hill, the seat of Canada's national government, and was intended from the start to serve as a focal point and gathering place. Although small and comparatively simple, the project was complicated by the need to satisfy both local and national officials, which meant we had to incorporate