Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Ken Smith, Mary Miss, Enrique Norten, Steven Handel and Mia Lehrer, Orange County Great Park, Irvine, California, 2006–
This new park on the site of an abandoned Marine Corps airfield will re-create a natural canyon with cool, semi-arid air, shaded
with palm trees. There will also be hiking trails, bicycle paths and a variety of other recreational facilities as well as a botanical
garden, national archive of the West, and a public library in an area where there are few public parks.
new buildings. The new park actually has plenty of facilities –
promenades, boat docks, ball courts, a little beach, a 4-
hectare (10-acre) safewater zone for kayaking, an extensive
new cultivated and natural green landscape. It will meet the
water with floating walkways and tidal marshes that will
contrast with the massive bridges and elevated highway
nearby. But the political connections of one of the developers
have aroused suspicion, which is not uncommon when
there is new development in established neighbourhoods.
And there is always the possibility of conflict of interest
with privatisation.
In Irvine, California, south of Los Angeles, where Ken Smith
is designing the Orange County Great Park on a former
Marine Corps airfield, only 545 hectares (1,347 acres) of the
1,902-hectare (4,700-acre) air station will be devoted to
parkland. The rest was sold to the Lennar Corporation, a
developer who is creating new neighbourhoods around the
park with access to it. Here, to sell the idea of the park to the
community, the designers have put up a huge orange hot-air
balloon – the idea of the artist Mary Miss who is working with
Smith on the park. It has a gondola that holds 25 to 30 people,
so that classes of schoolchildren and tourists can go up and
see the park being built. ‘It’s our visitors centre, and the
converse of that is that wherever you are in Orange County,
you can see the balloon,’ Smith points out.
Working with Miss, architect Enrique Norten, the
restoration ecologist Steven Handel, and LA landscape
architect Mia Lehrer, Smith brings the same witty sense of
wonder to this enormous project that he has to many smaller
ones in New York. But he is dead serious about the
environmental mission of the park. ‘In Orange County,
everyone depends on cars, though people actually do spend a
lot of time outside and at the beach,’ he says. ‘They did a lot of
surveys out there and what people were really concerned
about was sustainability. But when you ask them, they don’t
really know what it is. They mention economy, ecology,
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