Hargreaves Wins Competition to Design L.A.'s ‘Cornfield' State Park

Your team won an important competition to design the Los Angeles State Historic Park at the ‘Cornfield.' What challenge does this site and community pose for designing this park?

We divided the challenge into two parts. One part was to address the cultural history and the surrounding neighborhood to develop a park that expresses the various inhabitants in and around the site, and the history of the site. On the other hand, they wanted it to embrace the larger forum, so to speak, of the city and to have regional consequences as well as local consequences so that it would become part of a day in Los Angeles.

In 2001 a Trust for Public Land director told TPR that many in the environmental community and other park advocates consider the Cornfield site a "field of dreams." Have their dreams been realized through this competition and your team's selection?

I hope so. I think we've begun to give a vision to a lot of the hopes and aspirations people have for the site, and through the development of the programs, the physical design, and some of the three-dimensional modeling and imagery we've created takes it a long way towards becoming a physical manifestation of what people have been looking for the past five or six years.

One of the challenges for the site is its disconnection from the surrounding neighborhoods. How does your plan breach the railroad tracks to ensure that residents have access to the park when it opens?

We've envisioned three bridges across the railroad lines and the freeway. One of those connects in Chinatown, another to the neighborhood to the east, and the last is a fauna bridge that connects animals from the park to Elysian Park. So we're making a connection through bridges, and when those bridges arrive at the site, one of them has a media center and café and another has administration and an environmental center.

Whom do you envision using this park and how?

It will be a multitude of people, running the whole gamut. On a typical weekend there might be a festival, which would draw a certain amount of people. There would also be the day-to-day users, who would go to the children's playground, the café, and the gardens, to play informal sports.

Then you might have visitors who come to the park to check out the media center, look at the electronic murals, or have lunch. We've tried to design and program it for a multitude of uses and users that would ebb and flow depending on the day and what sort of programming was in place.

How might the park relate to the just-released L.A. River Master Plan?

At the far eastern part of the site we have dropped the grade and, at high flows, are trying to bring water from the L.A. River into the site and create riparian wetlands that will increase the wildlife habitat on the site. We have looked forward and adopted some of the L.A. River Master Plan ideas into our project.

The Cornfield stands at the northern end of Downtown on Alameda, near the train station. Does it play role in revitalizing this area?

I think it does. The area south is undergoing a transformation, and the park will accelerate that transformation. It'll change from warehouses to live-work spaces while maintaining some light industrial uses. The area will be upgrading because of the park.

The park is governed by California State Parks but obviously is of great importance to the city and the citizens of Los Angeles. How has the park's governance impacted your planning?

The State Department of Parks and Recreation is our client and they will run the park. But from what I've seen so far-and we've been involved for six or seven months-they do so with a very close view to what's going on in the local areas. The activists in Los Angeles who have been involved with the project are still involved, so while the state is in charge, we're seeing strong local influence.

The guidelines of the design competition were widely praised. What about them was useful, and what boundaries did you find most difficult not to cross?

We looked at Elysian Park-not with an eye towards relocating Dodger Stadium and building high- rises but more to go into the park and take areas that were in disrepair and try to accentuate it in one of two directions. We considered the eastern and southern parts in terms of ecology and habitat, and we sought to make the area north of Dodger Stadium more active, so we tried to bring more active recreation to parts of Elysian Park and use the parking lot at Dodger Stadium and create more environmental impact in another area.

Your design won out over two others, by, respectively, Thom Mayne/Field Operations and Mia Lehrer. As your design evolves, will you consider incorporating any elements from either of their designs?

Not really. Our plan is pretty full as it is. We don't envision having a parking structure and Dodger Stadium, so there's nothing we can get from Field Operations. And I think that the design from Mia Lehrer's team was not urban. This park is in Downtown Los Angeles, and we predict a million people a year could come to it, so given that, I think we're happy with how we envision the program for the park.

What's the project's timeline?

State Parks Director Ruth Coleman is trying to get the project built by 2010, which we think is realistic. We're working with about $50 million, though not all of that is in-hand. The benchmarks are that there's an approved design within the next year, that two years from now there's a set of drawings that are going out to bid or negotiate, and that we're breaking ground in late 2008.

Elaborate on the challenges of creating an urban park on this scale and within State Parks system.

The National Parks Service has a similar issue on their hands as well. We were involved in Crissy Field in San Francisco, which is an urban park in the National Parks system that has over a million visitors a year.

The parks systems have to come to grips with the fact that urban parks are less about recreation and being complete natural resources and more about having a lot of people come to them and do what they do. There are festivals, cultural events, picnics, informal sports-the gathering you get in urban areas. That's different from the State Parks mission, which is either active recreation or natural resource conservation.

So it's kind of like adopting a new user who is urban-oriented and uses these parks as their backyards, particularly extended families. A lot of folks whose ancestry lies elsewhere will use urban parks as their outdoor living rooms. They gather their extended family, and you see that all across Europe and North America, where large groups come and spend a whole day there.

Who else is on your team? What experience do you and they bring to this project?

The team is pretty interesting. We have developed urban parks and waterfront parks for about 20 years and have worked places as far-flung as Lisbon, Sydney, Montreal, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and the list goes on. We have a lot of experience, but we're continually looking for ways to make urban parks more and more relevant to as many people as we can.

Michael Maltzen, who is one of the most promising architects in the country and in Los Angeles, is a great collaborator, and I think when you get a chance to see the bridges and buildings that are part of the design you'll see that it's very seamless. So it's great to have him on the team. And Arthur Golding helped us on a lot of the urban design and community issues, and he was a valuable addition as well. Finally, Kathryn Spitz Associates will help define the detailed landscape.

It's a combination of our national expertise and people on the ground who know L.A. and have known this project for years giving the state the best product they could possibly get.