Playing with parks

ALL URBAN PARKS are a dialogue between nature and man, the fortuitous and the planned, the contemplative and the active, the spiritual and the temporal, the moment and history. It is a dialogue that has been going on for more than 100 years, and though its results vary, our urban parks have usually wound up at one pole or the other, subject to one theory or another, so that the dialogue usually turns out to be a monologue.

What I propose for the Grand Avenue Project's 16-acre public space is that two fundamental ideas of park design be merged to create an area that is both a pastoral wilderness and a theme park. In effect, it would be a park in constant dialogue with itself.

At one end of the conceptual spectrum is the 19th century idea of the park as a retreat from the city that surrounds it. This was the guiding principle of Frederick Law Olmsted, whose Central Park in New York provided the model for urban parks well into the 20th century. As Olmsted saw it, Central Park posed a "class of opposite conditions" to that of the city. If the city promoted activity, the park advanced leisure. If the city pushed concrete and asphalt, the park promoted grass and trees. If the city represented urban materialism, the park represented rustic spirituality.

Olmsted wanted Central Park to be a raw wilderness, but he recognized the impracticality of turning 843 acres over entirely to nature. Instead, he settled on a compromise of the untamed and the controlled -- a partly manufactured wilderness with grassy fields, small forests, man-made lakes and manicured pathways. This prompted some critics to complain about the park's artificiality. A park may be \o7for\f7 man, they griped, but it should not be \o7by\f7 man.

Artificiality marks what urban historian Galen Cranz called the park as "recreation facility," the other end of the conceptional spectrum.

In this view, the park was an active space continuous with the surrounding city, where one could play ball, fly a kite, dance or listen to a symphony. Here one didn't want to maintain the idea of nature but the idea of use. The park as recreation facility was a means to an end, while the park as pastoral oasis was an end in itself.

One may not think of Disneyland in Anaheim as an urban park. But if Central Park was the apotheosis of the pastoral park, Disneyland is, in many respects, the apotheosis of the recreation facility, with one fillip: Walt Disney redefined recreation not as something one did but as something one experienced.