Ken Smith, ASLA: Going Through the Scales
With the Orange County Great Park under way, Ken Smith, ASLA, is moving from the small-scale projects he's best known for to the largest park project in the country.

Ken Smith, ASLA

The following is a partial transcript of LAND Online’s interview with Ken Smith, ASLA, from the 2006 ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO and 43rd IFLA World Congress. Click here to listen to the full audio of the interview.

The scale of the Orange County Great Park is absolutely massive. I’d like to get a sense of how you manage something like this. How do you take hold of it from a logistics standpoint? How are you organizing it? How many people are working on this at one time? What are the moving parts? You’ve set up a West Coast studio just for this park, right?

We have a very big team. First, the core team is a collaborative design team with Mary Miss as the artist, Enrique Norton as the architect, Mia Lehrer, ASLA, as the landscape architect, and Stephen Handel as ecologist. So, there’s a kind of breadth right there to deal with something of this scale. Beyond that, I formed a joint venture with a construction manager, Gafcon, which does construction management for large infrastructure projects, because I’m not a very big firm, and I’m not particularly interested in taking on all the administrative work, and that’s what they do very well. So, that joint venture is very useful in terms of putting the core structure together for the project.

We have a building on the base, and in the building I have my design studio, and Gafcon has their people—right now they have maybe a dozen people. Mia Lehrer has three people there. Stephen Handel has an office that’s staffed off and on with two people. Mary Miss has an office that’s staffed with three people off and on, and so everybody is embedded in this building. Right now, we’re doing the Preliminary Master Plan (video link). The thing is moving very fast, there are pieces of it that are going to move into design, development, and construction documents even before the master plan is finished. The mass grading is moving very quickly, the backbone infrastructure is moving very quickly. So, what we’re starting to do is set up design studios within the larger studio that will deal with specific things. The first one that we’re trying to set up now is to deal with grading, and then there’ll be another design studio that we’ll set up that will deal with the design of features, there’ll be a group that’s dealing with the planting designs, and another group that’s dealing with the hardscapes and pavements and the layout of specific areas. So we’ll set up these teams within the studio.

I remember reading one of the articles in the Orange County Register where they described you as standing before several cafeteria tables in your studio drawing the park out. First, is that accurate, and second, what will that drawing be used for? Why that instead of, say, a computer model?

The studio is laid out with plastic cafeteria tables—the kind they have in church basements and lunchrooms—with the idea of keeping the studio really flexible, because I know that as we move forward we’re going to reorganize things over and over again to make it work. Half the studio is a big gang of tables with computers and people doing construction, and the other half is tables all ganged up into one big table; it’s a place where we build models, and it’s a place where I mark up and draw. But there are difficulties on a project this big—the canyon, for example, is two miles long—and at the time that story was written I was working on the grading of the canyon. And you can’t take two miles and put it on a computer screen and know what you’re doing. And you can’t window in to some little piece of it on that screen and know what you’re doing either. So what I was doing at that time was, I had taken the basic rough layout of the canyon area at one inch equals thirty feet, and the whole thing was actually longer than the table, and we kind of slid it back and forth on the table. But I was literally going through and mapping out the contours of the canyon and blocking out the slopes, and the berms, and the terraces and things, and on particular areas I was actually doing one-foot contours—drawing in one-foot contours to make sure the thing worked.

So, once I got a piece down to one-foot contours, that set up how that was going, and then I blocked the other stuff out. Then we would send those drawings out and have them scanned, and then we brought them in in phases for the CAD work to pick up the lines. But it’s really a scale issue—it’s all computer work, and I’m perfectly good at computers. I’m not good at CAD, but I’m very good with Photoshop, it’s just the scale is such that you have to get it out to know what you’re actually doing.

And then we’ve been blowing up parts of it to 1-inch equals 10 feet, just to understand the scale. Next week we’re unveiling the preliminary master plan, so the whole master plan is being blown up to something like 1 inch equals 12 feet, so it’s an 80-foot by 80-foot drawing. We’re putting it on signboard vinyl, and we’re covering the whole plaza in front of City Hall with this big map of the master plan of the Great Park and it’s so people can come and take a walk in the park. The idea is that if you print the thing at 300 scale, or 500 scale, you look at it and it doesn’t look like there’s anything going on in it. It doesn’t look like there are any spaces in it—it’s a diagram.

 When people think of you doing this project, a couple things come to mind. First is the question—you’ve never done anything on this scale, how is this going to turn out? But second, your name is on this—it’s not EMBT, or Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey—it’s Ken Smith. In a real way, this is going to be a legacy project for you. What are your thoughts on both of those aspects of this project?

Well, it’s my team. My name is on it, but it’s my team, and all of us are like me. Enrique Norton is a very good architect who is an auteur—he has a signature to what he does. Mary Miss has a signature to what she does, and Mia has a signature to what she does. So we have a group of people that have a very strong signature, a very strong sense of public space, and very interesting ways of thinking about sustainability, which are maybe different than the normal three overlapping bubbles that you get out of the textbook.

I don’t think about it [as a legacy project]. I’m just doing the thing. Actually, it sounds stupid but I don’t actually see it much differently than the little 20-foot-by-20-foot project that we detail down to every little inch. It’s the same attention to detail, although certainly we’re doing bigger detail here, but it’s the same kind of enterprise. It’s a way different scale and will have a huge impact on Orange County.

On a practical level, will you be able to work on anything else while this is going on, and if so, how?

Oh, we’re just busy as hell. I mean the New York office is really busy. We’re doing the Goldman Sachs world headquarters, and we’re working on the Jacob Javits Convention Center with Richard Rogers, and we’re just about to start the East River Waterfront Project that we did the master plan for last year, and that’s been funded, and we’ve been hired. And there’s RFPs out for other stuff, and there’s a little competition for a museum in Denver. I mean, the New York office is doing what it does, because it’s basically kind of specialized in doing small and medium-sized projects, and the California office is geared to working exclusively on this one project, and I ping-pong back and forth.

I’m really interested in 55 Water Street Plaza, which you did with Rogers Marvel. It’s a really exquisite space in, frankly, an awkward place. What do you think you accomplished there, and do you think it will be successful in getting the public to use what is seemingly a private space?

You know, I have the reputation for doing these little art things and installation things, but I’ve always rejected this notion that you can’t do art and environmentally responsible things and socially responsible things all together. I’ve always found that thinking it’s either one or the other is a completely false notion. So for me, 55 Water Street is an exercise in doing something that’s socially responsible and beautiful, and there’s no reason why you can’t do those things together. I mean it’s really an understanding of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, because that’s what New York is, and if you do spaces that don’t work socially in New York, well, they’re not going to survive, people won’t love them, and they’re not going to work. So I thought a lot about Whyte’s work. I’ve read it, and I understand it, and I always think about it when I’m doing projects—but I don’t use it as a formula; it’s not a cookbook. It’s not like Projects for Public Spaces, where they have a cookie cutter, where you have to have the seven things triangulated and a cookie stand over here.

Part of 55 Water Street is understanding the scale of the thing. I think there’s quite a beautiful progression going up those escalators, going up the slope, and having a little slot of a view of the water, but not really being able to see the water, and having it unveil itself as you move up the slope. And that’s not cookie-cutter stuff, that’s not formula, it’s not something that comes out of a theory book, it’s just understanding space. It was a good competition, it was a good collaboration, we had our fights, but we did a good job.