the parsley.blog.landscape.life

the day I went to see the new Orange County Great Park – that is, the little bit of it that has been built, and the drawings and visions for the part that is yet to be built – was a day between two rainstorms.  in fact, as it happened, it was valentine’s day.  the kind of weather, a blindingly blue sky day,  that just about forces you into an optimistic frame of mind.

now mind you, the temporary “preview park” is about 30 acres in itself, which is an amount of open space that most of us in southern california would shed blood to reclaim. never mind the grand vision, the 1200+ acre total that is planned, that is going through the long long process, too exhausting and exhaustive to detail here, from vision to conception to reality.  it has been well documented elsewhere, and it will be going on for quite some time.

the question I didn’t realize I had in mind when I went to the park was, How do we as designers talk about what we do?  I was privileged to see a long and detailed presentation at the design offices and learn a whole lot about the process, but then we got out in the sunshine and saw how it’s being done in the preview park.  that to me was almost the better lesson.

there’s a visitor’s center, with plastic walls flapping furiously in the breeze.

big graphics on the wall, plan views at different scales.

stuff for the kids to do.  the cylinder in the corner explains about on-site water treatment systems that will be part of the design.

and then through the plastic windows…

outside, there was some kind of special event going on, and they were giving out free orange frisbees that were flying all over everywhere. every so often one would land at your feet and you would try to throw it back in more or less the direction it came from, which didn’t matter too much because there were so many around that no game would ever be interrupted by the temporary misplacement of a frisbee.  an impossibly friendly scene.  even the trees were introducing themselves.

and the boxed trees in the parking lot, and the temporary lights, were telling you all about themselves too.  urban heat island effect.  dark sky lighting.  I like this kind of textbook.

now, you gotta go up in the  big orange balloon.  I don’t want to hear any weak excuses about being scared of heights.  all around the balloon launch place is a berm decorated with the local specialty building material – “el toro stone”, the broken pieces of super-thick concrete that result from the breaking up of the original air base runways.

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here’s the balloon.

it’s free, but you have to make a reservation on site (and sign a pretty hefty waiver form.)  I think the snowflakes must have been because it was, you know, winter.

the berm area from above.

you can still see the marks of the original runways in the turf.  perhaps you always will be able to.  this strikes me, though, as something better than erasure of the past.

I have to admit, all the fresh air and sunshine and people chucking frisbees and the visions of what will come to pass all went to my head.  this is my kind of post-industrial playground.

it was valentine’s day, and I am a single person, but I gotta tell you, going up in that balloon into that sky was some romance.