Simpson Case Is Seed for ‘Garden of Justice’

Swirls of trees planted to resemble a huge, leaf-covered DNA molecule. A grassy promenade in the shape of a giant glove. An acre-wide body outline of a murder victim lying on a lawn.

Those are some of the ideas that 350 architects have proposed for a “garden of justice” that would replace a nondescript parking lot next to the Criminal Courts Building in the Downtown Civic Center.

The designers are competing in a conceptual landscape contest dubbed “The Juice,” which a panel of nationally known architects and artists finished judging Saturday in Los Angeles.

The unusual competition--offering a $10,000 prize to the winner--is being staged by a Mid-Wilshire architect as a tribute to murder victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman and other victims of crime. He hopes the contest will prompt county officials to approve one of the designs and make it reality.

Nearly a year in the making, the contest was almost scrubbed when organizer Wesley van Kirk Robbins found himself in the 304-member O.J. Simpson jury pool.

Robbins decided last summer to go ahead with the competition. He picked the courthouse parking lot as the site, realizing that officials might never build anything there. He settled on “the Juice” name to entice designers to incorporate issues of power and Southern California’s idyllic orange blossom image, as well as the Simpson case, into their entries.

But before he could send out entry forms to 1,000 architects as far away as Moscow and Tokyo, he was summoned to the Criminal Courts Building as a potential Simpson juror.

Luckily, the jury was picked before lawyers and court officials got to Robbins.

Otherwise it is likely that nobody would have visualized a combination park site and parking structure built to resemble a huge crime-scene fingerprint. Or the stone monuments etched with quotations about justice--and newspaper headlines from the Simpson trial.

The entries were bulletin board-size architectural renderings and tabletop scale models. The winner is expected to be announced July 4.

Robbins, 38, said he was stunned when he was called as a potential Simpson juror three months after he started organizing the contest.

“I was in a box from late September to early December--everything was on hold. It was kind of dicey whether we’d get it going like we wanted to,” he said.

After the jury was picked, Robbins hurried to pick the contest judges and finish mapping out competition rules and guidelines. Woven throughout them are references to the Simpson case--its victims, its cost to taxpayers and its impact on Los Angeles.

Competitors were charged a $50 entry fee to cover the contest’s costs and prize money totaling $15,000. Robbins--whose own work involves earthquake repair projects in the San Fernando Valley--said the competition did not quite pay for itself.

But it could pay off later if it makes Los Angeles County officials consider better uses for the asphalt courthouse lot, according to contest judges.

“It’s a very important piece of property. For it to be a parking lot is dreadful,” said Richard Ferrier, associate dean at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Many of the entries depicted landscape designs that could be built anywhere. Others closely followed the garden of justice theme.

A garden built around dozens of tourist-style coin-operated binoculars--each aimed to scrutinize the Criminal Courts Building--attracted Preston Scott Cohen, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, a San Francisco artist and architecture writer, was drawn to an entry that depicted 47,700 squares etched on a paved surface next to the courthouse. It calls for people to stand in the squares and, on cue, scream in unison about crime.

An entry that suggested slashes in the ground was praised by Karen Van Lengen, a New York architect and an administrator of the Parson School of Design there. “It’s about violence to Mother Earth,” she said.

Robbins said he hopes to find a place in the Civic Center to display the winning entries. If officials won’t let him, he’ll go public by showing computer images of them on the Internet.

He’s determined, he said, to do justice to the contest.