Making parks work so people can relax

Edwin SCHLOSSBERG has been called a Renaissance man, an intellectual jack-of-all-trades and the grand master of interactivity. Which label fits him best?

“Designer’s good,” replies Schlossberg, trim and white-haired at 57. “I like the idea of being a designer.”

Perhaps best known as the tall, quiet husband standing next to Caroline Kennedy at countless weddings and funerals, Schlossberg has earned his professional stripes as an award-winning creator of hands-on museum exhibits. In design circles, he is a pioneer in “experience design” -- environments that require participants to communicate proactively in public spaces.

His New York firm, ESI Design, conceived the interactive exhibits at the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island, the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., and Innovation Station at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. ESI also has designed the gizmo-rich exhibits for the Children’s Museum of Los Angeles, to be built in the Hansen Dam Recreation Area in the San Fernando Valley.

More recently, the 26-year-old firm has taken on one of its more unusual assignments: conjuring programs for the two dozen parks planned for the sprawling Playa Vista development. The goal is to cast Playa Vista, which has faced decades of community opposition, as a fun and happening place for people to live or visit.

ESI’s ideas for Playa Vista range from simple (“Don’t install walkways in the open spaces; let visitors determine their own paths”) to complex (turn the development into one big “hot spot” for wireless Internet access). “This is a really cool opportunity,” says Schlossberg, invoking his favorite adjective. “It’s such a great opportunity to create tools for a woven, integrated community. There’s something epic about it.”

Hundreds of apartment dwellers and a handful of homeowners already live in the project, just south of Marina del Rey. This summer, a crop of 200 or so homeowners are expected to move in to the development, which will eventually be home to about 13,500 residents.

Playa Vista will cost about $2.7 billion to build, with $40 million budgeted for parks. Executives hope to start rolling out some of Schlossberg’s concepts soon after the grand opening in September.

A CITY’S REFUGE

On a recent visit to the site, with a somber marine layer chilling the air, the 6-foot-2 Schlossberg sports a chic navy jacket with deliberately frayed seams and collar. (It is by German designer Jil Sander.) Peeking through the V are a bright white shirt and an electric-blue Thai silk tie. Faded black jeans and soft black leather boots complete the ensemble.

An open-air electric GEM vehicle takes Schlossberg on a spin through the property. “This sort of looks like the side streets in Manhattan,” he says along the way, pointing toward condos and townhomes. “It just keeps going.”

He thinks of New York’s Gramercy Park.

“It’s a park in the middle of high-density housing where they have readings and the community comes in to clean up, plant and prune in the spring,” he says. “There’s a day of chalk games -- hopscotch and such.”

Even with bulldozers rumbling across the site and opponents continuing to rail against the architecture, the landscaping and everything else about the development, Schlossberg can picture such communal activities in Playa Vista’s future.

Schlossberg’s philosophy meshes with Playa Vista President Steve Soboroff’s goal of creating a neighborly community within the metropolis. Soboroff, a real estate developer and unsuccessful Los Angeles mayoral candidate, was brought on in October 2001 because of his government connections and his proven ability to work with constituents who have markedly differing agendas.

Soboroff and Schlossberg met for the first time in August, when Schlossberg got his initial tour of the site.

“I loved going into the offices and hangars,” Schlossberg says, referring to the facilities that decades ago housed industrialist Howard Hughes’ aviation business. The experience sparked one of Schlossberg’s favorite ideas for a park.

Soboroff also recalls the initial meeting as stimulating, if somewhat humbling. “We talked the same language,” Soboroff says. “He was just a few light-years ahead of me.”

Schlossberg is accustomed to being out ahead of his audience.

The son of a prosperous New York textile manufacturer, he came of age intellectually at Columbia University, where his advisors included the polymath Jacob Bronowski and where he received a dual PhD in science and literature in 1971. (His published thesis was an imaginary conversation between Albert Einstein and Samuel Beckett, an idea that Schlossberg literally dreamed up while napping in Columbia’s philosophy library.)

By that time, Schlossberg had already spent years as a protege of futurist R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome. Schlossberg embraced Fuller’s notion that a high standard of living could be achieved for all the world’s citizens if Earth’s resources were used effectively.

In 1969, Schlossberg helped organize Fuller’s inaugural World Game Workshop in New York, an effort to promote cooperation in solving global problems.

With that first taste of mass interactivity, Schlossberg became hooked on the notion of enriching social interaction by improving communication.

For his initial design outing, he reinvented the Brooklyn Children’s Museum as a “please touch” environment. That was in the 1970s -- years before “interactivity” became a techno-age buzzword.

Schlossberg often uses high-tech gadgetry -- as in the 22-story, 7,700-square-foot outdoor video screen ESI designed for the Reuters news network’s world headquarters in Times Square. But Schlossberg also admires low-tech communing, like the log book in Central Park where birders record their sightings.

Wherever he goes, Schlossberg tends to seek inspiration at ground level. Back home in New York, many of his best ideas coalesce on his three-mile walk from the Upper East Side home he shares with his wife of 17 years to ESI’s downtown office on Sixth Avenue.

To Schlossberg, accustomed to the dense pack of Manhattan, Playa Vista appears big and wide open -- tailor-made for gardeners, joggers and model-plane enthusiasts. He’s well aware of the controversies that have dogged Playa Vista. Yet he was not dissuaded from becoming involved.

“Where do you make an effort, where everything is fantastic or where things are difficult?” he says. “Where things are difficult makes more sense.

“As people start to move in here, they won’t be carrying the baggage. They’ll look to make their lives great. I feel I’m an advocate for the people who have already moved in. I’m already past the problem.”

Many opponents, meanwhile, are not. At a recent neighborhood meeting, Soboroff touted Schlossberg’s hiring as a positive sign. Leslie Purcell, a staunch Playa Vista opponent, remains unconvinced. She runs through a litany of lingering issues -- from architecture that many deride as “San Quentin South” to environmental degradation to efforts to attach celebrity status to the project.

“Playa Vista keeps trying hard to get some celebrity cachet, first with Spielberg and Frank Gehry and now the Kennedys via Edwin Schlossberg,” Purcell says. “Are these [park programs] really things people will care about or connect to?” (DreamWorks SKG, of which filmmaker Steven Spielberg is a part, toyed with setting up shop at Playa Vista, as did architect Gehry. Neither did. Electronic Arts Inc., a video game developer, is reportedly negotiating a lease for most of the existing 240,000 square feet of office space.)

TRADING IDEAS

Moving indoors to a conference room, Schlossberg jots a couple of quick notes as Soboroff ticks off several ideas. Without missing a beat, Schlossberg tactfully improves on each one.

“You talked about some sort of branding event, with the world looking at Playa Vista for one hour a year,” Soboroff says. “How about an auction of entertainment industry props and memorabilia?”

“That’s a good idea,” Schlossberg responds, “but I was thinking more of an event emerging from the Playa Vista community. I’m very interested in aeronautics and using the wind here for model plane championships. It would honor the site’s history as the home of the Spruce Goose.”

Soboroff, a former Los Angeles city parks commissioner, nods along, imagining the buzzing of remote-control airplanes overhead creating positive buzz for Playa Vista. He mentions a park in the San Fernando Valley where people wait three hours to fly model helicopters. “That would be cool!” Soboroff says enthusiastically. “I like that.”

(Sure enough, within days, the idea takes wing. At Schlossberg’s suggestion, Soboroff contacts the Academy of Model Aeronautics, which sponsors model-airplane clubs. As it turns out, non-buzzing gliders will most likely be the models of choice -- to cut down on noise.)

Marketing vice president Kristin Ramsey, whom Playa Vista hired away from Coca-Cola, suggests that the developer could set up a booth at golf and tennis tournaments, with headsets offering virtual reality tours of the site.

“It would be cool to bring the green part of Playa Vista to that,” Schlossberg says. “Instead of a private VR experience, you could transform a GEM cart and put a screen around it. Instead of having a kiosk, you could put the whole thing on a GEM and create a garage and people could drive in to see the presentation.”

Soboroff grins at the thought.

“You’re talking a few bucks for that,” Schlossberg reminds him.

Soboroff then brings up an interpretive center that Playa Vista has promised to build.

Think “museum without walls,” Schlossberg suggests, with personal digital assistants serving as tour guides as visitors stroll along. There’s no need for a costly “environmental container,” he says.

In the meeting, Schlossberg -- an avid reader and the author of 11 books, with a 12th, about culture, in the works -- demonstrates his own eclectic tastes by citing Popular Mechanics one minute and a new book called “The Influentials” the next.

Written by two polling experts, the book underscores the importance of early adopters in shaping opinions. (Soon after the meeting, Soboroff orders 20 copies for Playa Vista marketing executives and builders. He imagines “influentials” buying Playa Vista homes and serving as greeters for prospective customers.)

Editors of design and architecture magazines say this is the first they’ve heard of a collaboration between a developer and a designer of Schlossberg’s caliber. Typically, outdoor spaces at housing developments are left to landscape architects, with programming as an afterthought.

“This seems to be a more progressive approach,” says Susan Szenasy, editor of Metropolis magazine in New York. “[Developers] think they provide the housing and have a community. As we all know, it takes much more than that.”

Soboroff saw the need to enliven Playa Vista’s parks not only for residents but also for the city at large. After planning half a dozen parks at the site, Soboroff and his Playa Vista team were running out of ideas. Soboroff didn’t want the other spaces to go to waste.

“There’s not enough park space in Los Angeles,” he says. “Whatever parks we have need to be laid out and programmed well so they can be utilized to the maximum.”

Henry Stern, a longtime New York City parks commissioner, told Soboroff about ESI’s work for such prominent clients as Time Warner, Sony and MTV. Soboroff asked for an introduction from developer Doug Ring, a member of the board of governors of the Children’s Museum of Los Angeles, which hired the firm in 2001 for the Hansen Dam site.

Schlossberg, personally working on Playa Vista with a five-person ESI team, says he’d like to see “a number of ceremonial rituals throughout the year.” He and Soboroff dispute the best approach for a pet Schlossberg idea: competitive gardening. The designer wants neighbors vying to grow the ugliest or smelliest plant; the developer leans toward the sweetest-smelling rose.

Other ideas are outdoor chess boards, a walk-in outdoor movie and a pottery studio.

Just having a studio, of course, is not enough. “What’s being produced by residents and visitors becomes part of the culture,” Schlossberg says. “Tiles will be put into the walls, and pots that are made will be used for plantings.”

Although Playa Vista is not much geared for children, Schlossberg -- the father of Rose, 14; Tatiana, 13; and Jack, 10 -- sees the need to design for the child within.

“If you design something for young professionals, that’s not all they are,” Schlossberg says. “They’re also square dancers, gardeners, they’re Jewish, African American -- each a community.

“The real richness is what happens between people. We design for the moments of awe and collaborative discovery.”

COW’S PERSPECTIVE

In Schlossberg’s world, too much knowledge can stifle creativity. “Every time we take on a project, I feel we need to be professional amateurs. We don’t have golfers designing the golf museum,” he says of an ESI project in New York City. “That would be almost a liability.”

If the technology ESI needs doesn’t exist, the firm’s multidisciplinary staff of 55 -- including researchers, writers, graphic designers, computer engineers -- can usually create it.

In 1981, for a model farm in Massachusetts, ESI invented the Sight Mask, which allowed visitors to see the world from the perspective of a cow (with nearly 360-degree vision) or a goat (through a rectangular pupil).

In 2001, the firm devised a database that allows visitors to sift electronically through the names of 22 million immigrants and others who came through Ellis Island.

At the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center, which opened in Washington in 2001, visitors record or write messages about faith that become part of a “living exhibit.”

For the planned Los Angeles Children’s Museum, ESI envisions the “Big Fun Cool Thing” -- there’s that adjective again -- an interdependent system that children will operate. They will be able to watch as the projects they create circulate throughout the building on something akin to a dry cleaner’s rack.

Soboroff so “gets” ESI that he is attempting to persuade Schlossberg to open a Los Angeles branch. Schlossberg says he is open to discussion, although most of the firm’s current clients are in the East.

Soboroff, no slouch in the creativity department, is also contemplating bringing some of Schlossberg’s ideas indoors once Playa Vista moves its corporate headquarters to a commercial building at the site come September. Soboroff plans to put chairs and games near window sills to inspire impromptu brainstorming sessions.

“What would Ed do?” Soboroff says. “That’s the thinking around here now.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Works by ESI

Project: The Pope John Paul II Cultural Center

Where: Washington, D.C.

Details: Opened in 2001, the center houses three floors of exhibits designed by ESI, including the Gallery of Community (pictured), which explores the role of community in Catholic life. Visitors to the center record and share messages about faith.

Project: Macomber Farm

Where: Framingham, Mass.

Details: Opened in 1981, this site was a working farm operated in conjunction with the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Exhibits encouraged visitors to understand animals. Here, a child uses a Sight Mask (an ESI invention) to see like a sheep (in black and white). The land was sold to real estate developers and the farm closed.

Project: Reuters’ headquarters sign

Where: New York City

Details: The Reuters news organization wanted a splashy sign to herald its arrival at Times Square. ESI designed a 22-story, 7,700-square-foot outdoor video screen, supported by a system of more than two dozen computers, that provides an almost instantaneous display of global news.