A Different Shade of Green: New Park Design in Los Angeles

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DnA, back in 2004, about incorporating a park into plans for development at Grand Avenue : ”LA has always struggled against the image of itself as a city,” he said then, “because it was founded essentially as a city in a park and this is not the place for a park.” )

Now, in our collective back yard,  a fairly extensive program of park-building is taking place, involving some of the big talents in garden design and landscape architecture. And what’s especially interesting about urban parks today, in LA as elsewhere, is that they are typically not being created on nice swaths of virgin land but rather  on brownfield sites (OC Great Park; Los Angeles State Historic Park), on disused infrastructure (Hollywood Freeway Park), on infill sites (Palisades Garden Walk and Town Square; design sketch, above) and on reclaimed wilderness (Baldwin Hills Park).

So it is very exciting to hear about an exhibit, opening tomorrow, June 2, of New Park Design, hosted by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and featuring designs by Ken Smith (Orange County Great Park), Hargreaves Associates (Los Angeles State Historic Park), James Corner and Field Operations (Palisades Garden Walk and Town Square), Rios Clementi Hale (Civic Park), Mia Lehrer (Baldwin Hills Park) and AECOM (Hollywood Freeway Park).

Parks in Urban Environments” at the Santa Monica Main Public Library. Highly recommended.

And if you want hear more about park design in Los Angeles, check out this DnA.