Gloria Molina Grand Park occupies a descending site in downtown Los Angeles, linking the Grand Avenue side of the Civic Center with the area toward City Hall. Opened in 2012, it reworked an earlier civic landscape into a sequence of public spaces. Its design is most easily understood through changes in level and the different kinds of gathering each area accommodates.
Four areas with different scales
The park includes the restored Arthur J. Will Memorial Fountain, a performance lawn, a community terrace and a larger event lawn. These are related spaces rather than one undifferentiated expanse. A small group sitting near planting has different needs from an audience attending a major event.
The fountain also links the park with the earlier Civic Center Mall of the 1960s. Its presence gives the new landscape a retained historical element, while the surrounding design changes how people approach and use it. The park is therefore a reconstruction of a civic setting, not an entirely new use on previously empty ground.
The slope requires several kinds of route
Stairs, ramps, sloped paths and elevators negotiate the site’s changes in elevation. Offering more than one route is essential because a dramatic staircase cannot serve every person equally. The design’s physical connection across the Civic Center depends on those less conspicuous alternatives as well as on its broad visual axis.
The terraces also create places to stop between levels. Rather than treating the slope only as a problem to overcome, the landscape uses it to distinguish spaces and establish views toward surrounding civic buildings.
Everyday use and civic gathering
The larger lawns accommodate programmed events, while smaller areas allow ordinary sitting and walking. Those uses need not occur at the same time or occupy the whole park. Event equipment and temporary closures can change the experience, but they belong to a public space designed to host collective activity.
The park’s relationship with government buildings gives it a civic context without prescribing a single purpose. It can support celebration, performance or a lunch break. Its contribution to downtown is the provision of connected outdoor space at several scales, with routes that make a steep institutional landscape easier to enter and cross.
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