Hollywood Park by Glavovic Nothard

What do architects bring to the urban landscape? Primarily ignorance of all the rules. At least the best do.

In the other Hollywood, north of Miami Beach, Margi Glavovic Nothard's Young Circle Arts Park opened on March 16, 2007. I wish she could upstage Weiss / Manfredi's Olympic Sculpture Park the way that Gehry's Guggenheim at Bilbao pushed Meier's Getty to the back seat. But like Bilbao, the Seattle park has a tight dramatic setting that is impossible competition for just another flat place in Florida.

Glavovic Nothard is my friend and I wrote the original grant in 2001 that secured $5 million in funding from Broward County for the park. No professional reason existed for her to design the park except other tenacious women had faith in her, especially Cynthia Bergman Miller (former director of the Hollywood Arts and Culture Center) and Mara Giulianti, Mayor of Hollywood. The park might be the first all female produced civic landmark in the same "natural" way that powerful men have enjoyed a free hand for so long.

When Glavovic Nothard started the process, her inexperience with park design showed. (Not urbanism where she is an expert.) She gathered images from everywhere trying to imagine all the kinds of spaces and events that needed to exist. These images were patterns like Christopher Alexander with his sense of the personal experience except with her modern eye that loved shape, color and play. She even managed to bring energy back to images used thoughtlessly by tired Florida landscape architects.

The problem with the Alexander pattern method is the unity. She resolves through a "matter of fact" urbanism, a hill and an extensive knowledge of hot climates (Born and educated in South Africa and practiced in southern California and Florida). The main plaza / pathway links to the pedestrian downtown and the children's area is closest to the single-family neighborhood. Every massive tree was saved and carefully understood for its character and space making.

Her finest act was to create a hill on the entirely flat park. In southern Florida, people are very sensitive to minor elevation changes, so the eight to ten feet makes the park unique and helps to subdivide the park into zones. MOST IMPORTANTLY, when you see the photos at the Aesthetic Grounds Visual Essays page, all the elevation difference is her design. In the future, everyone will assume that the hill is a natural situation and ignore her intelligence in the choice.

I can't finish this today. Too much time on the photographs. But I will return to discuss the park and the artist, Ritsuko Taho.

For the architectural historian, let me throw out something as you look at the photographs: Aldo van Eyck's ghost smiles over the park. Maybe it's a crossing of intelligences by African intensely interested in the Dutch and a Dutchman intensely interested in Africa. Glavovic Nothard and Van Eyck share the ability to make a multitude of places on a single plane by drawing small territories on the ground through material or shadow. The joyous cries of children on the opening day demonstrate that both believe that children's imaginations respond to abstract space and form at their own scale. Formally, they try the impossible: to make pathways dividers and places at the same moment. Most literally, the shallow hill enlarged by Glavovic Nothard is one of Van Eyck most famous drawings. Of course the works look nothing like each other and Glavovic Nothard contemporary spatial flow replaces Van Eyck's modernist cartesian rhythm, but still..............

Continue later.

You can visit the City of Hollywood website and see a panorama photo of the 2001 flat park.