Puzzling out a 16-acre park in downtown L.A.

The story: In a year or so, a 16 acre park will begin to emerge in the space between the Music Center and City Hall in downtown Los Angeles. It will be part of a major new redevelopment plan called The Grand Avenue Project. Developers and politicians, led by billionaire Eli Broad, solicited public input and are now pushing forward with tentative plans.

The plot twist: Without an invitation from the official park-makers, USC's Lear Center put out a call for more ideas. School children crayoned pictures, design students turned in class projects, and professionals poured out models and pointy headed ideas for what some think could and should be this city's signature public space. Today's section looks at some of these ideas, brilliant and crackpot, as it explores the process and philosophies of park-making.

(Jennifer Birkeland, Corey Fox, Lauren McCullough, Daniel Miller and Samantha Moran)	1	More than a few gurus think good parks, including Los Angeles', should somehow embrace a city's soul. For the folks behind this design, water is key — and so what if the vision reflects a famous public space in another city?
(Michael Jantzen)	2	Park designers like people. They feel as if they've failed if their transformed spaces remain empty. And if whimsy is a draw, some will give it a try — hence this wind tunnel-bridge meant to whip out electricity and energize visitors.
(David Mabs, Angie Jun, Michele Licea and Sonia Noriega)	3	Another breed of park-maker recoils at anything smacking of techo-gimmickry, preferring unstructured nature in which people can savor a semblance of the landscape that was here before humans arrived.
(P. Vaughan Davies)	4	A sprawling blank green slate would lend itself to the flexibility that many urbanologists find essential to a diverse city's changing demands.
(Hera Hamalian, Katie Kreiser, Erin Patterson and John Wiersma)	5	Paths, formal or uncharted, are a part of any park, and if those paths can fuse the green to other parts of gray downtown, well, cool!
(Paulina Bouyer-Magana, Adam Harwell and Crystal Wang)	6	If those paths also reflect an iconic element of modern L.A. (see 1), cooler still, these park-as-freeway fans say.
(Bunker Hill quote from Tim Quinn)	7	But don't forget the past. "A few out of scale, old-fashioned buildings in the midst of all this concrete could bring a note of grace and dignity back to a place that once had an abundance of both," argues a devotee of historic Bunker Hill .
(David Fletcher, Jae Uck Ahn, Christopher Alexander, Mia Lehrer and Alexander Robinson)	8	Finally, even landscape visionaries must confront the hard reality of slopes, soil composition and lot size, in this case by concocting splendid cascading terraces.