Grounded in Reality

The challenge: Build a 10,000-square-foot nature center overlooking one of the state’s most environmentally sensitive areas, Upper Newport Bay, and put it in front of Newport Beach homeowners who don’t take kindly even to trees that block their panoramic views.

Daunting? Yes. For Tim Miller, it meant years of planning for Orange County’s Upper Newport Bay nature center, which, when finished in December, will be the county’s biggest park structure.

Getting the $3.8-million center built was like a course in Compromise 101 for Miller, head of the county’s harbors and beaches division.

Critics didn’t want it so large. Purists asked, “Why build anything?” Many eyed the interior classrooms, desks and wet and dry laboratories on the drawing boards with suspicion.

“We heard from naturalists who wanted to preserve their favored endangered species,” said architect Ron Yeo of Corona del Mar. “And we had some endangered species eating other endangered species. It got to the point, what are you going to do?”

But Miller had built a wide support group and continued to work out compromises.

Early on, he won backing from Frank Robinson, the 80-year-old granddaddy of upper bay environmentalism. Robinson’s foundation donated $55,000 for part of an interior exhibit. Then Miller garnered support from a Santa Ana businessman and his wife, Peter and Mary Muth, who donated $1 million to help build the center.

To mollify surrounding homeowners, construction went down, not up.

“We wanted something that didn’t attract visitors so much and didn’t detract from the views,” Miller said. “The whole idea was build down into the ground, burying the center. We needed something that blended in.”

Yeo’s plans called for removing tons of earth, creating an underground construction site. Once the center is complete, dirt will cover the facility, allowing grasses to grow and help conceal it from nearby homeowners, who can continue to watch the summer sunsets from their balconies.

“I think it works out nicely,” local homeowner Mark Ross said about the underground construction. “They wanted it to be less of an intrusion, and building it this way helps it blend in.”

As for the facility, Ross said “it’s a great thing” for the park, though he wasn’t as enthusiastic about parking problems that may occur if the park becomes extremely popular.

Since the 1960s, when Robinson first moved to a home near Upper Newport Bay, the back bay has had a reputation for anything but a peaceful setting. “There was always a war going on for something,” Robinson said.

In one well-publicized battle, Robinson and other Newport homeowners thwarted plans by the Irvine Co. to develop the upper bay. The company lost a court fight to Robinson’s Orange County Foundation for the Preservation of Public Property, which argued that tidelands are part of a public trust that cannot be handed over to developers.

The developer eventually negotiated a sale of 750 acres to the state for $3.5 million that created the Upper Newport Bay preserve. As part of yet another settlement, the company turned over 144 acres of bluff-top areas, including the new park site, in order to expand Fashion Island.

In many ways the new park center symbolizes the bay’s hard-fought legacy.

“This is a plan that has evolved over 10 years,” Yeo said. “At hearings, bicyclists wanted bike trails everywhere, the equestrian people wanted only horse trails. By the time you put all these uses together there’s nothing left of the environment.”

Plans now call for a limited number of trails, which “made some people unhappy,” Yeo said.

“Early on, people were saying, ‘Hey, don’t block my view.’ We had 12 different locations we could put the building, and it became a logical thing to go underground,” he said.

Yeo said he wanted to respect the land, which was a Native American camping ground. He experimented with Native American tepee structures, but they didn’t fit. He tried clay as a building material, but it required too many columns.

They decided to use recycled materials, such as concrete from sand and gravel in dry river and creek beds. The doors and windows are recycled, and the carpets will be ground-up plastic and recycled soda bottles. “Even the steel and rebar is recycled,” Yeo said.

The upper bay, with its pristine environment and abundance of wildlife, serves as a living classroom, attracting hundreds of schoolchildren and UC Irvine students.

Robinson said the nature center will be used to explain the spectacular wildlife and the wetlands below. About half of the center’s interior will be filled with exhibits. The Upper Newport Bay Naturalists, a local volunteer bay preservation organization, has agreed to provide wildlife lectures by volunteers.

Already, $80,000 has been raised by environmentalists to pay for a documentary by a wildlife filmmaker, who will highlight the bay’s changing seasons. The project will be part of the center’s exhibits.

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A Study in Compromise

A 10,000 square-foot nature center being built into a hillside at Upper Newport Bay Regional Park will blend into the ecologically sensitive topography and preserve the views of nearby Newport Beach homes.

Sources: Ron Yeo, project architect; Joanne Quirk, Orange County Public Facilities and Resources Department

Graphics reporting by BRADY MacDONALD / Los Angeles Times