Hollywood Central Park - Student Design Competition

Friends of the Hollywood Central Park (FHCP) is excited to announce an Ideas and Inspiration Event in connection with the development of the Hollywood Central Park - a mile long cap park that covers the 101 Freeway. This Event will advance contemporary architectural thinking surrounding the increasingly recognized role of urban parks in the strategies of cities globally toward transformative action to meet critical challenges of our time. 

Architecture, planning and landscape architecture students currently attending a university in Los Angeles county are invited to participate in a regional student design competition.   Please email [email protected] to receive the full competition brief, project materials and submission requirements.

Context 

A new generation of urban parks throughout the world are serving as examples of the possibility of new paradigms for transforming our relationships among ourselves and the environment. These parks are providing a direction forward in the face of unprecedented contemporary global social, technological and environmental change - surviving and thriving in service to equity, social and environmental justice for all. 

Purpose 

This event will provide Los Angeles area students of the design arts and sciences - architecture, landscape architecture, planning and associated disciplines - with an opportunity to showcase their Hollywood Central Park ideas in a public forum. This park will be a major social and environmental infrastructure that will reinforce transformative positive change to our region. Intent An event will be held in the Fall with the community, leading public officials, urban and environmental policy makers and stakeholders, city planners, architects, landscape architects, engineers, artists and others. We are reaching out to you, tomorrow’s design leaders, to participate in a competition that will challenge the notion of what a park is today, rethink urban infrastructure and conceive of new applications for technology in the interest of a bold and sustainable future.

Description of the Park

The Hollywood Central Park (HCP) is a proposed 37.6-acre park, which will create an open space resource serving as a focal point for recreation, connectivity and civic life.  This innovative project will be built in the airspace above the Hollywood Freeway on an engineered deck and support structure, capping the approximately one-mile portion of the Hollywood Freeway trench located between Bronson Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard with a street level park. The Park will reunite divided neighborhoods and enhance mobility and connectivity by providing an extraordinary open space directly benefiting one of the densest, economically disadvantaged and under-served communities in Los Angeles.  The physical, social and cultural contexts and potentials of the proposed Park offer significant opportunities, both in terms of the immediate surroundings, and the larger community of Hollywood and Los Angeles.  The unique attributes of Hollywood the place, and Hollywood the symbol are intimately associated with the motion picture and media industry - the Movies - and recognized around the world as expressing the “California Dream” associated with the future possibility, re-invention and transformation.