It is the kind of topsy-turvy switch the culture is full of these days.
For months, the planned Civic Park downtown languished as a much-overlooked sibling to a huge $3-billion mixed-use development on Grand Avenue designed by Frank Gehry for the developer Related Cos. Setting aside $50 million to help finance the park was, literally, the price Related had to pay to strike a deal with the Grand Avenue Committee, which controls the publicly owned land on which Gehry's commercial development as well as the park would rise.
But now, with the commercial portion of the development delayed by financing troubles, the park has emerged as the more viable of the two projects. A substantial chunk of funding for its first phase -- $56 million, including interest that has accrued from Related's original payment -- is sitting in the bank, ready to be spent.
That makes the park, which would cover four parcels of land running downhill between the Music Center and the steps of City Hall, the rare development project whose funding, at least for an initial phase, is secure. Construction is scheduled to begin a year from now, with a sizable "event lawn" opening along Spring Street as early as 2011.
Unfortunately, the design of the park, by Mark Rios of the Los Angeles firm Rios Clementi Hale Studios, remains something less than the sum of its parts. The problem is not with any particular element of the design; in fact, the latest version shows some significant refinements to an initial scheme unveiled almost a year ago, particularly in dealing with a group of existing garage ramps and with roughly 80 feet of grade changes from the top of the park, along Grand, to its base near City Hall.
The design has traded curving geometries and arcing footpaths for straighter tree-lined promenades, in part to smooth access for fire trucks. A set of "grand stairs" along Broadway has gained a compelling new clarity. The plan also proposes turning a ramp along Broadway 90 degrees to open up pedestrian access to the park.
But those improvements haven't resolved the design's fundamental identity crisis. The proposal as it stands now, in what is being termed a "base park plan," reaches too far, and eagerly takes on too much aesthetic responsibility, to succeed as anything resembling a master plan. By filling in as many design details as it does, it seems to foreclose the possibility of operating as a crisp, reserved foundation for other designers, artists and architects to build upon.
