The Great Park: Believing in Design

I read with interest the recent LA Times article on Orange County’s Great Park project (“A Soaring Vision or Just Hot Air” 10/1/09 http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-great-park1-2009oct01,0,6540980.story). I think soaring vision. In an era too often characterized by diminished expectations, landscape designer Ken Smith’s plans for the Great Park represent the best of our instincts to plan ambitiously for the future while borrowing a sense of scale and precedent from the past.

If you haven’t heard of it, the Great Park, proposed as a repurposing of the decommissioned El Toro Marine Corp Air Station between I-5 and Irvine Boulevard, will be a billion dollar project to make over 1347 acres of runways, hangers, and other former military buildings into parkscape.

The project is so large that Smith has assembled a team of landscape architects, the Great Park Design Studio, to fill in his vision.

The legacy of park designers like Joseph Paxton, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Fredrick Law Olmsted, seems somehow alive in the Great Park concept.