Los Angeles wants changes, especially in its city downtown, and this brings a lot of proposals to it. Yesterday, the City of L.A. announced Mia Lehrer + Associates and OMA have won the competition to design the FAB Lab, a new public park in the center itself. They have been selected out of a really competitive group, including names as AECOM, Brooks + Scarpa and Eric Owen Moss Architects.
Los Angeles City has selected the team formed by Mia Lehrer + Associates (MLA) and OMA to design a new park that will soon become one of the most important civic spaces in the city center. The project will be directed by landscape architecture studio based in Los Angeles, MLA and will have a design team that includes the firm OMA as design architect and the firm IDEO. The overall management of the project will be carried out by the City’s Bureau of Engineering.
 

Description of the project by OMA

The MLA, OMA, IDEO design for the proposed First and Broadway Park, to be known as “FAB Park,” incorporates themes of food, art and land to celebrate the exceptional diversity of Los Angeles. Featuring a split level restaurant and array of sculpted shade canopies distributed among a lushly planted grove of mature trees, the design maximizes the site’s potential to draw in the diverse mix of people that live, work and visit downtown, providing a comfortably cool space of respite and a dynamic place for cultural events.

Designed as the park’s frame, a lush layering of native oak and sycamore trees offers ample green space and much needed shade. Beneath the broad canopied trees, a collection of shaded outdoor rooms sized for small group gatherings animate the heart of the park – called the “Gallery” – creates a highly versatile central space for curating food fairs, art installations, and other civic and community serving events.

“We are excited to have the opportunity to design this destination park, providing Los Angeles with a new place to experience nature and culture” said Mia Lehrer, president of MLA. “We also want to thank Councilman José Huizar for his leadership and vision in bringing a new park to Downtown LA and the City’s Bureau of Engineering for leading a thoughtful process for design.”

The park also features a split level restaurant and sculpted shade canopies designed by OMA to provide comfortably cool spaces of respite. OMA Partner Jason Long commented, “FAB park will be a meeting point for civil servants, journalists, arts patrons and DTLA residents. Our design for the restaurant is a dynamic building that facilitates two distinct levels of service: quick and casual on the ground, refined and elegant above. Each level activates diverse experiences ranging from café to test kitchen to amphitheater seating.”

Maximizing the park’s potential as a destination and promoting activities throughout the area, program elements will foster awareness of on and offsite events through user-experience design by IDEO and curation of art by Marc Pally.

The park’s design is founded as a holistic strategy for sustainability with the potential to achieve "net-zero" energy and handle all onsite stormwater capture, treatment and infiltration. The California-native plant palette will maximize comfort, shade and beauty, while minimising the need for water and maintenance. Park program components, including the restaurant, are envisioned to provide a self-generating economic resource for the park operations.

The 1.96acre site, located at 217 W. 1st Street in Downtown Los Angeles, was purchased by the City’s Department of Recreation and Parks from the State in 2013, and was made a dedicated park land for the development of a new park, under the City’s “50 Parks Initiative.”

Given the prominence of the site, and the City’s interest in embracing innovative design thinking, the Bureau of Engineering (BOE), in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office, the 14th Council District Office, and the Department of Recreation and Parks, held a design competition to elicit creative ideas from talented local design professionals for the development of an iconic park at this prominent site in the Los Angeles Civic Center. Finalists were announced in November 2015.

The park project is anticipated to open in 2019.

 

 

 
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Architect
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OMA. Partner.- Jason Long
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Team
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Timothy Ho, Wesley LeForce, Sunggi Park, Sandy Yum
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Collaborators
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Landscape Architecture.- Mia Lehrer + Associates
Technology and Food Lab.- IDEO
Art Curation.- Pally
Culture.- Romanelli
Food.- Muhlke
Community Outreach.- Arellano
Sustainability and Engineer.- Arup
Economics.- MR+E
PSOMAS.- Civil Engineering
Park Management.- MJM
Executive Architect.- GRUEN
Lighting.- Francis Krahe & Associates
Cost Estimation.- LENAX
Constructability Review.- DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRIES
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Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is an international practice operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism. AMO, a research and design studio, applies architectural thinking to domains beyond. OMA is led by eight partners – Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen van Loon, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner-Architect David Gianotten – and maintains offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha, and Australia. OMA-designed buildings currently under construction are the renovation of Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) in Berlin, The Factory in Manchester, Hangzhou Prism, the CMG Times Center in Shenzhen and the Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux.

OMA’s completed projects include Taipei Performing Arts Centre (2022), Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles (2020), Norra Tornen in Stockholm (2020), Axel Springer Campus in Berlin (2020), MEETT Toulouse Exhibition and Convention Centre (2020), Galleria in Gwanggyo (2020), WA Museum Boola Bardip (2020), nhow RAI Hotel in Amsterdam (2020), a new building for Brighton College (2020), and Potato Head Studios in Bali (2020). Earlier buildings include Fondazione Prada in Milan (2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), De Rotterdam (2013), CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2012), Casa da Música in Porto (2005), and the Seattle Central Library (2004).

AMO often works in parallel with OMA's clients to fertilize architecture with intelligence from this array of disciplines. This is the case with Prada: AMO's research into identity, in-store technology, and new possibilities of content-production in fashion helped generate OMA's architectural designs for new Prada epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles. In 2004, AMO was commissioned by the European Union to study its visual communication, and designed a colored "barcode" flag, combining the flags of all member states, which was used during the Austrian presidency of the EU. AMO has worked with Universal Studios, Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, Heineken, Ikea, Condé Nast, Harvard University and the Hermitage. It has produced Countryside: The Future, a research exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, including Public Works (2012), Cronocaos (2010), and The Gulf (2006); and for Fondazione Prada, including When Attitudes Become Form (2012) and Serial and Portable Classics (2015). AMO, with Harvard University, was responsible for the research and curation of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and its publication Elements. Other notable projects are Roadmap 2050, a plan for a Europe-wide renewable energy grid; Project Japan, a 720-page book on the Metabolism architecture movement (Taschen, 2010); and the educational program of Strelka Institute in Moscow.

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MIA LEHRER + ASSOCIATES is a full service, international landscape architecture firm located in Los Angeles, California. Under the leadership of Mia Lehrer, the firm has led the planning, design and implementation of a diverse range of public and private projects. Varying in scale from large urban parks and redevelopment initiatives that engage community members and stakeholders, to intimate gardens where collaboration and coordination of architecture and site are the primary objective, the firm applies a holistic and intensely creative approach to all projects.

The firm’s design solutions are imaginative, inventive and comprehensive, requiring profound technical expertise and breadth of experience. They develop landscape design concepts that engender richly layered experiences, deploying the enduring qualities of natural and manmade elements as well as ephemeral characteristics of materials.
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