Interplay Volume 4: Inevitably LA

Editor’s Letter

Like so much of Los Angeles’ history, looking backwards is necessary to appreciate its meteoric rise over the past 200 years. Decade and after decade, the city has shapeshifted—in population, cultural influence, and daily life. Or has it? Recently, RELM learned that the father of landscape architecture, Fredrick Law Olmsted (FLO), wrote a plan for Los Angeles in 1924. This is the same man who gave us Central Park and designed the park systems in Boston, Seattle, and Kansas City. Then, a few years later, his sons, the Olmsted Brothers, followed up with their own plan for the region in 1930. Why isn’t either plan widely known (within and outside the discipline)? And more importantly, why isn’t LA’s park system regarded with the same stature as those in other Olmsted-designed cities?

Answers, we found, were a mixture of shock and awe. Did LA even have a shot of being a walkable city 100 years ago, much less now? Was accessible open space accounted for in LA’s city planning? What is the history of LA’s park system? RELM’s Hana Georg, Landscape Architect, and Valorie Born, Director of Strategic Communications, led a research initiative to learn how the hand of the almighty Olmsted family was or was not implemented. The following interaction is part of an ongoing studio dialogue looking to understand how Olmsted Senior’s 1924 Major Traffic Street Plan and Olmsted Juniors’ 1930 Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region inform LA’s modern open space network.