A Great Park chill brings on cold feet

When we last checked in on the Orange County Great Park, plans for the 1,300-acre project on the site of the former El Toro air base were moving ahead with promise, speed and a surprising lack of rancor. After a pair of juries trimmed 24 entries in an international design competition to three firms, momentum quickly gathered behind a single finalist, New York landscape architect Ken Smith. Officials in other cities -- including Los Angeles, where planning for a new civic park downtown is just getting underway -- began talking about the Orange County effort as a model for balancing design, politics and public input.

All that remained, it seemed, was for the Great Park Corp.’s board, which is made up of the five members of the Irvine City Council and three independent directors, to make Smith’s choice official.

Alas, the situation has grown murkier, and a good deal more combative, in recent weeks. Several board members, worried about the ability of Smith’s small office to handle the sprawling project, are now leaning toward another finalist, the Northern California firm Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey -- conveniently forgetting that they’d dismissed its initial park proposal as irredeemably bland. Others are giving more thought to an alluring but rather abstract plan by the third finalist, Barcelona-based EMBT. The board’s chairman, former Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, continues his efforts to cobble together a majority for Smith and his team, which includes artist Mary Miss, architect Enrique Norten and L.A. landscape designer Mia Lehrer.

It remains unclear what will happen when the board members reconvene Monday morning. They may choose Smith’s team, whose design features a dramatic man-made canyon with buildings by Norten and others tucked into its side walls. They may hand the job to Royston or, in the least likely scenario, to EMBT. Or they may insist that the three finalists collaborate, an ill-conceived idea they first publicly explored at their Dec. 15 meeting.

Of course, cold feet and failure of nerve among public officials are nothing new when it comes to expensive, high-stakes building efforts. Yet the park, which will include wetlands, wildlife corridors, cultural buildings and athletic fields, in many respects marks uncharted territory for American landscape architecture. It combines the size and ambition of Olmsted-era designs, such as Central Park in New York and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, with the complexities of a Cold War cultural and military legacy and an emphasis on environmental sustainability. It holds the potential to reshape the image Orange County projects to itself and the outside world. And it arrives in an era when the public increasingly expects bold design in large-scale public and cultural projects.

That last fact, it turns out, may explain many of the problems now plaguing the project. As cities from Seattle to Dubai use iconic buildings to burnish their reputations, we’re seeing more cases in which leaders praise the benefits of adventurous design and then run into trouble when they realize that such design carries significant risks or doesn’t neatly match traditional definitions of civic architecture.

That contrast between architectural ambition and political reality -- or, to put it another way, between high-design iconography and bureaucratic prerogative -- was on display to an excruciating degree during the Great Park board’s Dec. 15 meeting. Finally facing the chance to make good on their promises to bring a “visionary” and “world-class” design to Orange County residents, board members instead executed a perfect 180-degree turn toward conservatism. They lauded the “long history” and “long-term viability” of the Royston team. They worried aloud about Smith’s lack of experience, particularly in working on large-scale park designs.

“I’m going to make a decision based on who can deliver -- on security,” said one board member, Irvine Mayor Pro Tem Sukhee Kang.

After a couple of more hours of parliamentary hand-wringing, the board voted to explore the idea of asking the three finalists to join forces, in a vaguely defined collaboration, on the final park plan.

It is one thing, given the scope and complexity of this project, to choose one winner and then ask that team to enlarge its ranks. That’s what happened when Michael Arad prevailed two years ago in a high-profile competition for the World Trade Center memorial. Then a 34-year-old architect with virtually no record of built work, Arad was convinced by the jury to add the Berkeley firm Peter Walker and Partners to help flesh out and execute his design.

But it is quite another to ask the finalists suddenly to embrace one another as collaborators and meld their very different schemes into one. That notion is a recipe for infighting and inefficiency. Even worse, it essentially precludes a strong central design vision shaping the new park. Imagine if jurors for the National Book Award, unable to pick a winner in the fiction category, asked three finalists to sit down in a locked room and not emerge until they’d produced a single novel.

In fairness to the board, it is true that the competing designers have made their decision tougher in recent weeks. Royston has been furiously -- though always politely! -- lobbying to win the job and has worked to improve its design, though it remains largely uninspiring. Ken Smith has failed to quell concerns that he isn’t fully committed to the project and would make only occasional site visits -- even as EMBT principal Karl Unglaub has promised to move to Orange County if his firm wins the job. And by fleshing out in recent weeks what had been little more than a compelling wisp of a scheme, EMBT has, for the first time, emerged as a viable alternative to the Smith team.

But the shifting tone of board members’ comments raises a basic question: Why stage a high-profile international design competition if you are going to make a choice, in the end, that has so little to do with design?

Had the board followed a more traditional process from the start, it might simply have reviewed a stack of resumes, checked client references and chosen Royston or a similar firm directly. That would have saved a good deal of time, strife and taxpayer money -- and likely guaranteed a competent, inoffensive park plan.

Or the board, quite reasonably, could have decided to select one firm as the lead design team and another firm, presumably a well-established one with a large Southern California office, to oversee the execution of the park. This arrangement is increasingly common in architecture; it offers much clearer lines of authority and responsibility than the various “collaborative” scenarios the board raised last month.

In organizing an ambitious competition and promising a single winner, though, Great Park planners raised hopes among Southern Californians that they would be pushing for a design that would do much more than simply meet budgets and construction targets. And in making Smith’s team one of the finalists, the board and jurors alike were making the implicit case that the group was capable of overseeing this complex design.

A few board members have argued that the park is large enough, and its programming and terrain diverse enough, to accommodate a range of design approaches. But that very complexity makes a single guiding vision more crucial. Indeed, thanks simply to the long list of constituencies they have been asked to satisfy, the finalists’ designs already suffer from too much variety in form and content, not too little.