Flight plan soars

AT a time when Renzo Piano is at work on Wilshire Boulevard, Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne among the high-rises of downtown Los Angeles and Rem Koolhaas on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, perhaps the single most promising design project in Southern California is slated for a very different kind of location: an expanse of cracked-asphalt runways and peeling military barracks in the geographical center of Orange County.

There, on the site of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, the city of Irvine and the Miami-based developer Lennar Corp. are moving ahead with ambitious plans to turn nearly 4,000 acres of land into the Orange County Great Park. The federal government shuttered El Toro in 1999; it was on track to become a huge new international airport before Irvine voters finally killed the idea in 2002 in favor of open space.

The new park will have commercial development along its periphery and will include meadows, trails, wetlands, wildlife corridors, sports fields and a cluster of cultural buildings. Its first phase is scheduled to open in 2008.

Last month, an impressive list of seven competing teams -- led mostly by landscape design firms but also stuffed with architects, artists, engineers and environmental consultants -- was trimmed to three finalists. There is a group headed by Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey of Mill Valley, in Northern California; another by Ken Smith Landscape Architect, a firm in New York; and a third by Barcelona-based EMBT Arquitectes, founded by the late Catalan architect Enric Miralles.

A final decision had been expected this month. But the board of directors of the Orange County Great Park Corp., set up by the city of Irvine to administer the competition and run park operations, decided last week to delay the announcement until January. The board, which includes the five members of the Irvine City Council and four independent directors, is getting ready for a series of trips to visit recent work by the finalists in the Bay Area, New York and Spain.

They shouldn’t bother. The proposal by Smith’s team -- a high-powered group that includes the Mexican architect Enrique Norten, artist Mary Miss and Los Angeles landscape designer Mia Lehrer -- outshines the other two plans in both imagination and rigor. The board should acknowledge the obvious and get on with the business of building Smith’s promising design, which alone among the finalists combines a fully contemporary aesthetic with respect for the military and agricultural history of the site.

The Great Park project will include 1,316 acres of parkland ringed by a 2,400-acre band of commercial development. The budget for the park section alone, pegged initially at roughly $500 million, will certainly go higher and may ultimately approach $1 billion. The park will be funded by Lennar -- in an arrangement similar to the one Related Cos. has struck to develop for-profit parcels and a civic park along Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles -- and by property taxes paid by owners of new residential development at the site, which will include 3,400 houses.

Rivals Griffith Park’s size

Orange County residents may wish the ratio of developed to open land were less generous to Lennar. But at more than 1,300 acres -- a figure that doesn’t include nearly 1,000 open acres that will stay in federal hands -- the park will be bigger than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and will rank second in size in Southern California only to Griffith Park in Los Angeles. The park may even manage to give culture mavens in L.A. a reason to envy their neighbors to the south.

The envy should grow more intense if the team led by Ken Smith prevails. Although his oversized black-framed glasses immediately mark him as a member of the design intelligentsia, he has a surprisingly down-to-earth, even folksy manner. That quality comes through in his work, which is spare, with Modernist and classical roots, but also brightly colored and approachable.

His current projects include landscaping for the area around Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s 7 World Trade Center tower just north of the ground zero site in Manhattan and, with the architects Richard Rogers and SHOP/Sharples Holden Pasquarelli, a design for the East River waterfront.

At the heart of his proposal for Orange County is a canyon snaking through the center of the park. It would be formed by scooping earth from the center of the canyon and piling it on either side in tall berms, creating a valley that would be 2 miles long and more than 60 feet high at certain points.

Near the center of the park, Smith’s canyon would widen significantly to accommodate a lake, a lodge and an amphitheater, which Smith says would be modeled in part on the outdoor theater at Swarthmore College, where the seats are shaded by thick foliage. Indeed, Smith talks fluently about combining in Orange County the kind of park that is designed for finding isolation in the middle of nature, such as Yosemite, with the kind that accommodates culture, such as Stern Grove in San Francisco. Smith’s plan would also include an outdoor military museum of sorts on the old El Toro runways, arranging 50 vintage aircraft in a long row.

The canyon has the dramatic scale of an earthwork. But it would have practical benefits as well: The planted canyon would stay several degrees cooler on summer days, Smith predicts, than the rest of the park.

Most of the park buildings would be built into these new canyon walls, keeping them naturally ventilated and cooled and lessening their visual impact on the open space. That basic plan is bound to be enlivened by the touch of architect Norten, 51, who has emerged in the last three years or so as one of the most promising talents of his generation. Now based at the University of Pennsylvania, Norten and his firm TEN Arquitectos are working on the Brooklyn Public Library for the Visual and Performing Arts and a proposed new Guggenheim Museum in Guadalajara.

Key player was absent

His absence at the design presentations late last month in Irvine, though, couldn’t have been encouraging to park officials. His team will have to make a point of clarifying his level of involvement.

There are some problems with Smith’s design, which like the others is very much a work in progress. It seems to promise all things to all people, from fellow wearers of cool glasses to World War II veterans, which in and of itself ought to be considered a red flag. But sometimes flaws in a preliminary design can be heartening: They suggest that a team is stretching for innovative solutions.

The scheme by Royston Hanamoto, by contrast, feels tidily worked out to the point of conservatism. It would salvage more of the existing El Toro runway forms -- which now dominate the site in a large cruciform shape -- than Smith or EMBT, turning some sections into huge reflecting pools lined with tree-shaded promenades. And it proposes transforming two of the airplane hangars that dot the site into greenhouses of a sort.

The plan is driven by sophisticated ideas about sustainable energy and has the advantage, which shouldn’t be discounted, of a California pedigree. But it remains too slavishly dedicated to the axes created by the runways, while Smith’s plan suggests an interplay between those geometric forms and the flowing shapes of the canyon. And overall, the Royston design lacks the spark of real invention that should be a prerequisite for a project of this scope and ambition.

Underwhelming

At the heart of EMBT’s plan is a lake with thin fingers of water pushing out into the parkland and a raised boardwalk, planted with palm trees, that would carry pedestrians through the center of the park. But the scheme remains too much of a sketch to inspire real confidence. And the way the EMBT designers describe the heart of their plan -- an abstract notion about folding the shapes of the old runways into crumpled new planes of space -- didn’t seem to have much impact on the park board when the scheme was presented in Irvine.

It didn’t help that EMBT principal (and Miralles’ widow) Benedetta Tagliabue, kept out of the country by a visa problem, didn’t make it to Irvine, or that the team’s model didn’t show up in time either.

For all the attractions it promises to provide nearby residents, the Great Park is also part of a larger open-space planning effort in Orange County. When it’s finished around 2011 or 2012, the park will connect the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park with the Cleveland National Forest to the east, creating what park officials call the largest contiguous band of open space in any U.S. metropolitan area.

And if the border between the Laguna parkland and the new Great Park seems uncomfortably urban -- hikers passing from one to the other will have to cross over or under Interstate 5 -- well, that only seems to make the project more at home in Southern California. What’s a walk in the woods in the land of the automobile, after all, without the chance for a SigAlert?

For more information go to https://www.ocgp.org/