Archinect - News

Take a look at these bold visions for Downtown LA's next park

2016-02-24T14:26:00-05:00

LA has few corners as prominent as First and Broadway. Directly adjacent to the art deco City Hall and across from the LA Times building, the nearly-2 acre lot stands at the center of an increasingly well-trafficked pedestrian area. Now, some of the biggest names in town are competing to transform the lot into a bold new park.

After a wider call for proposals, the LA Bureau of Engineering, in conjunction with the Mayor's Office, announced a shortlist of finalists late last year: AECOM, Brooks + Scarpa Architects, Eric Owen Moss Architects, and Mia Lehrer + Associates in collaboration with OMA. Each practice was given six weeks to produce a design, which are currently of public view.

Soon, the City will announce the winners of the competition, following input from the public, and then will proceed to finalize the designs.

Since the new park abuts the larger Grand Park (designed by Rios Clementi Hale Studios), it needs to both stand out as a unique design and seamlessly mesh with the exi...

Christoper Hawthorne on the recovery of public space in Los Angeles

2015-03-26T21:12:00-04:00

"The public sector stopped making public space a long time ago," Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde told Wired magazine rather matter-of-factly in 1999. [...] A little more than two decades later, there is something quaintly fatalistic about Jerde's attitude toward the frail state of public space. In Los Angeles, at least, it has returned pretty dramatically to health.

Downtown Los Angeles' new Grand Park inspires grand hopes

2012-07-25T12:38:00-04:00

This week, after a $56-million renovation, that 12-acre rectangle from the top of Bunker Hill to the base of City Hall will be christened as L.A.'s Grand Park, providing downtown with its first sizable amount of open space.