Portfolio | Tongva Park

Quick thoughts on Tongva Park by James Corner Field Operations, which opened in Santa Monica in 2013.

Pros. For the New Yorker, it is fascinating to see Field Operations working in a West Coast landscape vocabulary. Both the High Line and FO’s losing entry in the Governors Island park competition have a brooding, British heath quality that would have been entirely inappropriate in southern California. At Tongva Park you get the meandering paths and super-textured plantings, but the visual palette is entirely different. I also appreciated the incorporation of similar design elements in playground and grown-up park. There’s no reason kids zones have to be ordered from a catalog and look the same everywhere you go. The comfort stations, designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners, are among the nicest I’ve seen in a public park, and kudos for not defaulting to a variant of pink and blue. The paths, whose plan is supposed to mimic the structure of a leaf (West 8 has a similar rationale for those on Governors Island), do indeed offer opportunities to cut through to Santa Monica’s pretty City Hall, to get lost at the margins of the park, or ascend the stucco ramparts for a view of the ocean and the pier.

Cons. Those alien portals, which serve as as street-front billboards for the park, are really weird. I am told their form refers to baskets made by the Tongva people for whom the park is named but, like the leaf structure reference, this reads as ex post facto rationalization. The idea of a structure to float people up in the air is smart, but these provide neither adequate shade nor seating for a social group. The fountain that runs along the entrance path is pretty, but it seemed to be doing less than it could to cool its surroundings. It felt like there was room for more water in the park, either in the form of a bigger fountain or more fountains. I was there during the heat wave, but I’m also hoping in a few years there will be more shade. Several sad picnics under the few fleshed-out trees. Overall, there was something rather polite about the whole park, which is probably suitable to its setting and yet — amidst Santa Monica’s proliferating neo-modern condominiums — I think something wilder could work.

Further reading: Christopher Hawthorne’s review in the L.A. Times. The park’s own site with a helpful abstracted plan (see, it’s a leaf). And, because this is a new amusement, Yelp.

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