Grand Prize

For all of its revitalization, Downtown L.A. still lacks a central gathering place. Pershing Square? Too much concrete. The Staples Center parking lot? Good for a Lakers victory celebration -- but it doesn't look like we'll be having another one of those in a while. And Skid Row might count -- but only if your name is Brad Renfro.

The L.A. Live development would love to become that hub, but that's like referring to The Grove as Los Angeles' main street. L.A. Live will be a gathering spot in that overly-commercialized, mass consumer sort of way.

That's why a lot is riding on the proposed 16-acre park planned for the strip between Disney Hall and City Hall. Imagined as "L.A.'s front yard," the park -- one part of the Grand Avenue redevelopment -- could be our version of a smaller Central Park or Union Square.

Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Norman Lear Center, recognizes that importance. That's why last July he expressed some concern that a design competition hadn't been included in the park's plans. In conjunction with the L.A. Times, Kaplan's Norman Lear Center launched the "Grand Intervention" campaign, gathering unsolicited ideas from some of the area's brightest in the hopes of stirring up some creativity and public interest in the park.

Kaplan blames the lack of a design competition from a stipulation that the winning developer (New York-based Related Cos.) and the other firms bidding for the project couldn't present design proposals. The park's unusual financing -- in order to redevelop Grand Ave., Related Cos. had to pay $50 million in upfront land-use fees, which will pay for the park -- also played a role.

The L.A. Times' Current section revisited the issue on Sunday, and Marty emailed us to highlight the Grand Intervention website (www.grandintervention.org).

Writes Kaplan in the Sunday paper:

The future of this park offers Los Angeles a signal opportunity to declare — to itself and to the world — what the right balance is between private and public, between commercial and civic, between a civic project that is created from the top down (that is by politicians and powerful developers) and one that grows from the bottom up and is inspired and nurtured by a passionate public.

If we believe that our city is the emblem of 21st century urbanity, then the way we imagine our new frontyard is a statement about what we think city life can and should be. New York's Central Park, Washington's Mall and the great boulevards and parks in many other cities, here and abroad, are not only places to stroll and have fun; they're messages to the world — messages about identity, creativity and ambition.
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Some of the most dazzling recent park designs, such as the High Line in New York and Downsview in Toronto, have sprung from competitions. There are plenty of ways to run competitions, from invited to open, from local to international. There are ways to write rules that set boundaries on budget, engineering and use. There are ways to build the committees that write competition rules and that choose the winners so that a wide variety of community stakeholders are represented. In Orange County, the process for designing the new Great Park has been a model of balancing competition and civic input with real-world practicality and accountability. There's no reason Los Angeles can't do that just as well.

The riot of ideas this Grand Intervention has already unleashed suggests to me that our city is eager to engage in every aspect of park design and programming — not just during polite, contained and essentially powerless encounters with the developer, but also in the back rooms and the corner offices where decisions get made.

I know, I know: Design isn't democracy. Planning isn't a popularity contest. Creativity doesn't come from consensus. But what's wrong with a little competition?

About 300 concepts have been submitted so far -- some a tad unusual (check out this design for futuristic floating pods) and others more traditional (like this lawn), but all interesting.



Check out the L.A. Times articles here; some ideas of what makes a strong park here; and some sample submissions -- including that way-out-there floating pod idea -- here.