Visions of Pershing Square Redesign Narrowed to Five

The way Frank D. Welch sees it, Los Angeles’ Pershing Square should be transformed into a classic Mediterranean plaza. John L. Wong thinks a botanical garden with a “crystal palace” would be nice. Barton Phelps would inform it, and have it inform us, with a sense of history. James Wines would unfurl a five-acre “carpet.” And Kevin Bone thinks that what the city really needs is another freeway interchange.

Another interchange?

Such are the five final entries in the $11-million Pershing Square redesign competition introduced Monday without a drum roll inside a tent on the homely, landmark, five-acre park atop a parking garage. A jury comprised of both professional designers and various officials chose the five finalists and five alternates from a international field of 242 entries.

“We have a wide selection,” declared Janet Marie Smith, president of the Pershing Square Management Assn. “I would put three in the category of the big idea.”

“The nature of a competition like this is that you’ll always have a few safe selections,” said architect William Taylor, whose high-concept design was chosen as second alternate.

Taylor and others agreed that Bone’s freeway--or, as he describes it, “The Botanical Freeway”--is the most provocative of the finalists. Bone was hardly alone, however, in celebrating the automobile culture of Los Angeles. About 10 entries alluded to the auto in various ways.

Among the designs displayed Monday that did not make the cut were one with topiary autos, another featuring auto-inspired sculpture and asphalt as a primary design element and a third combining three symbols of Southern California: a freeway-cum-aqueduct crumbling in an earthquake. At least two others touched on the temblor theme.

Bone’s design, sure to be loved by some and loathed by others, envisions a section of freeway interchange rising from the center of the park, overgrown with vines and flowers. Ramps allow visitors to walk on and under the “freeway.”

Like the other finalists, Bone was not present at the announcement. He offered this written explanation of the work:

“The freeway has symbolized a tension long present in American culture: the pastoral versus the technological, the conflict of the machine in the garden. There is no metaphor more apt to evoke the contours of the Machine Age than the freeway, yet it is also of the organic.

“The forms of the curvilinear elements that have grown from movement could well have been taken from the organs of a man or from the stems and roots of the plant kingdom. It is a beauty we have resisted but perhaps silently admired.”

Perhaps.

“That’s horrible,” a downtown resident in a baseball cap muttered.

Two women in business suits struggled for the right words. “It’s too, too . . . Gothic,” one finally decided.

Urban designer Angela Danadjieva, one of the jurors, said Bone’s concept showed promise, but her tone was skeptical. “We’ll have to see how it develops,” she said. “It needs more shade and cascading water. Only cascading water drowns the noise of the city.”

Bone and the others, who each earned $7,500 awards as finalists, will have until late August to refine their concepts. The ultimate winner will design the $11-million project, with a ground breaking expected in late 1988.

In Smith’s opinion, Phelps’ history lesson and and Wines’ “carpet” also offered big ideas.

Phelps essentially divides the plaza diagonally, with a giant compass as the (slightly off) centerpiece. A gridwork illustrates the 1849 survey of public lands by Lt. Edward O.C. Ord that presaged the Los Angeles real state boom. A stream represents the Los Angeles River, and “streets” bear the original Spanish and Americanized names (Calle Loma/Hill Street.)

In the other section, grassy knolls are dotted with vegetation imported from around the globe.

Wines’ scheme “integrates landscaping and architecture in one statement,” Danadjieva said. One might think of it as a giant quilt-work tossed loosely on the ground, with an undulating shape. But it too, Danadjieva said, would benefit from more trees for shade.

The Welch and Wong designs are viewed as the most traditional--the least likely to offend, Danadjieva said, but perhaps the least likely to excite. They integrate nicely with the surrounding city, she said.