The Park, A Context for Design
Guest Writer Doug Campbell
“Originalidad es la vuelta a los origenes”
“Originality consists in returning to the origins.”
- Antoni Gaudi
For the great Catalan architect, truth and beauty were found through intentional collaboration with nature - architecture is discovered - not invented - through a dialogue of purpose and nature.
The purposes of the Park are many – but can be said to be fundamentally three fold: healing, and sustaining well-being; finding and building common ground for community; and inspiring discovery and the imagination.
Placing the design process for the Park in the context of these purposes is a return to the origins of environmental design.
Traditional wisdom East and West concerning the relationships between the environment and well-being – Chinese Feng-Shui, Indian Vastu Shastra, and Western thought expressed in works such as the Greek Physician Hippocrates’ “Airs, Waters, Places” and later that of the Roman Architect Vitruvius all reveal an understanding of the connectedness of the building and the healing arts.
The practice of environmental design is as old as civilization. Diverse traditions speak of the imperatives of design on the land to create and sustain safe, healthy, productive and soul-nurturing environments.
Contemporary environmental design is increasingly at the center of a new intellectual and creative movement - re-visioning traditional origins and recovering and creating new sustainable and sustaining relationships between nature and society in the face of global environmental change of a scale, rapidity and consequence never before seen.
The worldview associated with this movement partakes of contemporary philosophy, physical and social sciences, engineering, the healing and building arts and the wisdom of world ethical traditions. It is ecological - asserting that “everything is connected”. The arts and sciences surrounding environmental design find models in biological systems, engage and are inspired by the creativity of the natural world.
Diverse professionals in communications, engineering, environmental studies, public policy, public health, urban planning and engineering, landscape and architectural design disciplines are moving toward a unified intellectual, creative and ethical enterprise with a special focus on the relationships between increasingly intertwined and “coupled” human and ecological systems.
These disciplines are emerging from professional “silos” in dialogue- engaged in overlapping and complimentary efforts, and can be usefully described together as collaborating in new hybrid multi- and inter- disciplinary initiatives.
Examples abound – in the healthcare field’s revolutionary emphasis on “wellness”; the Federal government’s encouragement of projects which collectively reinforce the policies of diverse entities such as the Departments of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency; and a growing emphasis in environmental education in the schools.
The Landscape
A landscape is a conversation between the generations and a conversation with nature. How we see ourselves in relation to place and one another - the stories we tell and live by - are our myths, affecting the landscapes we imagine and the landscapes we build.
As our understanding of ourselves in a new relationship with the rest of nature evolves, old forms are giving way to emerging new narratives, new possibilities growing out of the old.
The reclamation of urban industrial and transportation infrastructure into vibrant landscapes for public life represents a fundamental shift in thinking about cities - new narratives.
These new narratives and re-imagined and re-constructed landscapes emerging in our City are the bases of the Hollywood Central Park project, in the context of similar on-going efforts in cities around the world.
The transformative power of new attitudes about the landscape of the city has been widely discussed. The critic Michael Kimmelman has written of Madrid’s Rio Park, simply and eloquently summing up its impact on its surrounding neighborhoods - “Now people who opened their windows onto the sound of cars, open their windows onto the sound of birds.”
The site of the Park, the route of the Hollywood Freeway, has been a corridor of movement and life at least since the last ice age. This flyway for birds and path for animals across the plain and through Cahuenga Pass was a trade and hunting route for the first peoples, later becoming El Camino Real of the Spanish/Mexican colonists, who overlaid local wisdom with their own place-making traditions – carrying translations of Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture in their saddle bags. Though rendered in simple materials, the urban, landscape and architectural design expressions they brought were of great sophistication, beautifully and sustainably integrating building, landscape and settlement patterns into the natural setting. The explosive and mostly un-tempered growth and change of the American era also found here extraordinary examples of environmentally and socially conscious design in the work of Craftsman era and Modernist architects and landscape architects. Contemporary designers continue in explorations of this fascination with the possibilities of the land, light and air of Hollywood.
The Project
The community of Hollywood and the programmatic and formal aspects of the project present a particularly provocative context. Known world-wide, the imagined landscape of Hollywood is an iconic symbol of the creative possibility, fantasy and glamour associated with the Movies, and the quintessential southern California dream of continual self re-invention – limitless prospects - in paradise lost - and finally regained. At the same time, Hollywood neighborhoods surrounding the Park site are some of the densest, poorest, and starved for open space in the entire City of Los Angeles. Public health and social services challenges abound.
Discovering, and articulating the many layers of narratives associated with this project are leading to new hybrid forms - landscape and architectural expressions emergent from the possibilities of covering a freeway with a corridor of green nature – a greensward - as wide as a football field – and a mile long.
The Park’s stated ethic is as ambitious as its scale and scope: “…founded on an ethic that is in service to community, wellbeing, and sustainability….embodying the highest levels of social and environmental responsibility…” conceived fundamentally as a healing gesture - in bringing back together neighborhoods rent asunder, cleaning the air and waters, and establishing a corridor of green nature in the heart of the City.
As Central Park in New York was a manifestation of the last great vision of the city for the nineteenth century - enterprises such as the project for Hollywood and efforts in other cities throughout the world are manifestations of a new and transformative vision of the city for the twenty-first century.
“Environmental” considerations - climate, air, water, earth, energy production, pollution; and social imperatives - wellness, education, participation, justice, cannot be addressed individually – they must be explicitly seen and engaged as interconnected and interdependent aspects of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. A new, authentic aesthetic is emerging from this ethic - awakening the heart, mind and body to new possibilities.
The Process
The vision for the Park has come out of the surrounding community, the product of a collaborative participatory effort. Many voices have taken part in a growing conversation defining the future character and life of the Park. Through a program of workshop meetings centered on the participation by a wide representation of members of the community, supplemented by interactive on-line involvement through its website, the Friends have facilitated the creation of a concept plan which is being used as a part of the environmental review process. A committed group of community members and professionals in a growing array of specialties is establishing a framework for evaluating environmental and economic impacts and production feasibility.
The concept plan, as well as the process that created it, is now guiding the way forward for the on-going evolution of the Park.
The process of bringing the Park to reality has been founded on the initial recognitions of the Park’s role in promoting physical well-being and community. The bridging of a mile long segment of the Hollywood Freeway will from its opening day cleanse millions of cubic feet of air and water, restore neighborhoods rent asunder decades ago, and provide common ground for recreation and community. The establishment of a context for design is progressing from these two essential imperatives. The first broad strokes have been laid down.
These initial broad strokes have also acknowledged the Park’s third and equally essential identity as a participatory and continuing artistic creation - involving the users and stewards of the Park into the future.
As the process leading to the creation of the framework has involved many voices, a potential precedent has been set for the participation of many voices in the creation of the Park’s many particular artistic, architectural and landscape expressions. Specific works of architecture and landscape design may be relatively long –term presences, or temporary (as are the pavilions of the Serpentine Galleries in London’s Kensington Gardens) – or potentially among the coming generation of built things that are designed to morph and change over time under new conditions. Works of art and performance in the Park will encompass the spectrum - from the abiding to the recurring to the ephemeral. New technologies will allow the incorporation of virtual and augmented reality into all aspects of the Park, adding for example new dimensions to a child’s conversation with a tree. The Park will be among the first great civic works to be part of the coming “internet of things”, connecting us to one another and nature and enriching our lives in as yet unimagined ways.
Civic Purpose and Poetry
The Park lies at the intersection of civic purpose and poetry.
The making and continual re-making of this park – producing it – performing it - requires a special kind of art making – akin to that of the dramatic arts – especially cinema. The life of the Park must take into account and celebrate the many dimensions of expression possible that will also be unique to this art form in this place - Hollywood.
Through its living fabric of nature, artifacts and human activity, the Park will engage all the familiar five senses - sight, sound, fragrance, touch and taste, and in addition - the senses of space and time.
The great scale of the Park will open to appreciation an array of expansive and dramatic views. Extending across a series of great tree-lined meadows, the eye will take in and incorporate into the Park the hills to the north with their dramatic landmarks– the Hollywood Sign and the Observatory - and the skyline of downtown LA to the south – all under a vast horizon-to-horizon swath of sky.
The Park will bring an equally dramatic change to the soundscape. The currently persistent and debilitating roar of traffic will be replaced by the sounds of nature and play. This change, which in time will fall from notice, will be a fundamentally transformative aspect of the coming of the Park.
Fragrances of vegetation will replace the odor of freeway fumes. The sight, sound, fragrance and touch of water, the feel of sun, wind, turf, wood and stone, and the enjoyment of partaking of the tastes of the Park - including the produce from the Park’s vertical farm – all will open sensory channels now closed in defense against the assaults of the present environment.
Additionally, the Park will engage the spatial sense, experienced through movement – walking, running, strolling, resting - in the informal choreography of everyday life. As a living entity, the Park will also fundamentally engage the sense of time – memory, experience and anticipation. The Park will change and grow over time, manifesting the cycles of the day - midday, evening, night and morning, and the changing seasons – summer, autumn, winter, spring.
As the Park is an act of healing and an affirmation of community, it is also necessarily a portal for the engagement of the imagination.
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Greetings! Like you, I love the Hollywood Central Park. And this is an exciting time for us! With our environmental impact report moving through the CEQA process news comes that Hollywood has been named a Promise Zone! 
Dear Friends:
