Uh-oh..."ironic" parks

Orange County, California is building a huge new park out of part of an old Air Force base and has hired landscape architect Ken Smith:

'Great Park' Chooses a Team to Change the Landscape.

Peter Reed, a senior deputy director at Museum of Modern Art in New York, called Smith's work "avant-garde" and "cutting-edge."

"He's definitely into beauty. He's into irony. He's into meaning," Reed said. "The L.A. project would be very exciting."

Beware of designers who are 'into meaning'? Isn't any "meaning" which one might eventually attribute to a public space a function of how people use it? I'm not familiar with the idea that a designer should aim for meaning much less irony, Isn't functionality and pleasure enough?

(And of course L.A. is not in Orange County.)

Comments

[JRoth]

As you know David, I've been one to defend "meaning" and ideas in design before, but irony!? In a park? Heaven help us all.

[Brian Miller]

LA in Orange County? Heck, David, isn't everything west of Short Hills, NJ just one big amorphous mass?

As for cutting edge design, the Project for Public Spaces dings Deconstructivist architect Bernard Tschumi's Parc La Vilette in Paris(sp?) pretty hard. A landscape architect, however, visited the park and found it full of various activities, including informal use. I always found the bright red structures rather endearing. So, ideas, if they don't get in the way of the park function, can be fine in a park. Irony? I would consider ironic another statue of a glorious military general, but that's just me. :)

[Tom Beard]

I know what you mean about the way that "meaning" can overwhelm usability in some designs, and how grand formalist or avant-garde gestures are often only appreciated by other designers and not park users. However, I certainly can see the place for meaning and irony in the design of public spaces.

For example, isn't there something deeply ironic about the very notion of a recreational park on the site of a military base? That a place that is supposed to be "natural" and life-affirming is sited on a place that stood for death and destruction? If Smith is planning to bring these issues to the fore (and it sounds like he is, for example by retaining fragments of the runway and historic aircraft), then that could certainly be done in a way that is meaningful, ironic and playful. If that can be done without compromising the ground-level attractiveness and usability of the park, then it adds another layer and brings more richness to the experience.

When a site has history, it has meaning.