Before being known as the Piggyback Yard Collaborative Design Group (aka the PBy Collaborative), a collection of representatives from individual firms met with FoLAR Founder Lewis MacAdams and Executive Director Shelly Backlar on the heliport of a multi-story parking garage associated with the County of Los Angeles Twin Towers Correctional Facility in October 9, 2009. It is the only accessible location with a clear view of the Los Angeles Transportation Center, familiarly known as the Piggyback Yard.
The newly minted PBy Collaborative then convened bi-weekly from October 2009 until late May 2010 in the pursuit of a conceptual master plan focused in and around the Piggyback Yard. By alternating between information gathering sessions, working design charettes and invited guest critiques, each meeting furthered our knowledge, the level of collaboration, and the design proposal.
Investigation
Given a publicly inaccessible site of the scale and complexity of the Piggyback Yard, our first task was to use a multi-pronged approach to investigate and map the focus area. Following the initial site visit, small groups revisited the adjacent neighborhoods and facilities in order to identify any available access points to both River and site. We toured the River channel itself with Los Angeles City Councilmember Tom LaBonge.
We quickly contacted key stakeholders and decision makers, who put us in touch with local public and private experts intimately familiar with the jurisdictional and systematic fabric. Mining these experts for knowledge and further connections, we also collected information on current and proposed happenings in order to develop a thorough definition of the hidden context into which we were stepping.
Exploration
Armed with information and mapping diagrams, the PBy Collaborative kicked-off our design process via a multi-disciplinary charette organized around our preliminary themes of River, Land and Access. Overwhelming similarities between each thematic result led to the rise of a single basic conceptual construct, the documentation of which allowed us to define our collective design goals and strategies for the first time. The Core Team (consisting of the PBy Collaborative and FoLAR) coalesced around the newly identified urban moves, challenging itself with the question of implementation and highest-and-best-use. Gaps in our specific site knowledge were revealed, thus leading to a meeting pattern that alternated working design meetings with strategic injections of expertise.
Evolution
In order to accommodate schedules and available working times from all collaborative entities within this pro bono project, our group explored initial concepts as individuals and small groups but made decisions at meetings as the PBy Collaborative, with input from FoLAR, the City of Los Angeles River Office, and our technical advisors as well as critical feedback from various experts and stakeholders. We studied multiple iterations of how to make manifest our design goals and strategies. Particular attention was paid to varied River configurations, seeking the proper balance between open space and development, and finalizing the definition of the extents of our study. Finally, we teased out our final four themes: Water, Open Space, Connectivity and Community.
Communication
The complexity of the Piggyback Yard project lies in both the physical characteristics of the site and the necessary intricacies of the conceptual proposal itself, which must be based in an infrastructural reality in order to properly convince and inspire. In fact, many of the project’s challenges lie in the enormous potential of the site juxtaposed against the issues of implementation: the intersecting public jurisdictions, the currently scarce funding sources, the likely need for remediation and the inertia of historical decisions among others. The PBy Collaborative found itself compelled to be responsible not only for addressing the physical issues of the proposed design, but also of curating a larger conceptual story that will outlive this initial design effort and become part of the dialogue for a more vibrant and more connected Los Angeles.
In this last part of the unofficially dubbed “Phase 1: Design” we developed this conceptual story and practiced telling it in a manner that segued into “Phase 2: Now”. This website and its contents are part of that collective PBy Collaborative storytelling effort, as are any related press conferences, presentations, and gallery exhibits. However, the PBy proposal will only be able to live on with your help as well. We have planted the seed; please help us cultivate it. Join PBy.