11 Semifinalists Named in Arts Park Design Contest

Eleven teams of architects and artists were named Tuesday night as semifinalists in a contest to design Arts Park L.A., a cultural center envisioned for the Sepulveda Basin.

The contest was organized by the Cultural Foundation, a group of San Fernando Valley businessmen and art patrons who have been working toward their dream of building the Arts Park.

Designers from the United States, Europe and Japan were among the 124 teams that entered the contest. Each team consisted of an architect, a landscape architect and an artist.

Each of the 11 teams will receive $7,500 and is scheduled to present a detailed, three-dimensional model of Arts Park’s structures to the foundation this spring. Designs for each of the five main buildings envisioned for the park will be selected from the entries of the semifinalists.

“What we have gathered is 45 of the most talented people in the country and beyond our borders,” said Donald Stastny, a Portland, Ore., architect acting as an adviser to the competition.

“We are creating something that has never been done before,” Stastny said. “We are creating the park of the 21st Century.”

A 2,500-seat concert hall, an open-air performance glen, a natural history museum, a cluster of exhibit spaces and a children’s art center are envisioned for the Arts Park by Cultural Foundation officials.

“We really feel we’ve made a major step toward our goal,” said Doris “Dodo” Meyer, the foundation’s chairman, who called Tuesday night’s announcement “a new chapter in the foundation’s history.”

Doubts About Project

But there remain doubts about the project.

The first concerns funding. The Cultural Foundation has yet to begin raising the at least $50 million needed for construction. Several fund-raising experts in Los Angeles have expressed skepticism that the group will be able to come up with the money.

Foundation officials said Tuesday night--as they have all along--that fund raising will begin in earnest once the design competition is finished.

Last month, another concern arose when the Sierra Club filed suit to stop the Arts Park.

The environmentalist group has long opposed locating the Arts Park in the basin. Sierra Club officials want to force either the Cultural Foundation or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns the land, to seriously consider alternative Valley sites for the complex.

The suit is pending.