The Lighting Practice Re-Envisioning LOVE Park

TLP’s Al Borden and Emad Hasan are excited to be a part of the design team re-envisioning LOVE Park.

LOVE Park located in Center City Philadelphia is a major tourist destination and showcases Philly’s iconic, beloved LOVE Sculpture. This cement and granite park has attracted a range of visitors from skateboarders to newlyweds. The city as a whole has been extremely invested in the plans for renovation. The design team based their recently revised concept on feedback from the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Parks and Recreation, their own expertise, and multiple public forums where locals were able to give their two cents. The re-envisioned LOVE Park will be an oasis of green in Center City and will continue to feature the LOVE Sculpture backed by a fountain of water. Below Inga Saffron beautifully describes the design and what’s to come.

A bold new vision for LOVE Park

Inga Saffron | Friday, May 1, 2015

There are many ways that the new design for LOVE Park could have gone wrong. The square at the gateway to the Parkway is an engineering nightmare, perched above a parking garage and a train tunnel. The $15 million budget is barely adequate. And in the course of a series of public meetings, more than a thousand people offered the architects their two cents about how the space should look.

So it is remarkable that the designers, Hargreaves Associates and Kieran Timberlake, have found such an elegant solution to this impossible problem. The plan unveiled Thursday by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation is the Goldilocks of park designs. Not too formal. Not too relaxed. But just right.

The design balances the need for a certain amount of civic formality with our desire for a cozy, green refuge in Philadelphia’s government center. There will be a green lawn where the public can throw down a picnic blanket. But the new design ensures that the iconic diagonal connection to the Parkway remains strong.

The plans also manage to preserve two important features from the existing park: the beloved “spaceship” building, and the jet of water that forms the picturesque backdrop to Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture.

Full Article: A bold new vision for LOVE Park