Project Description
After several years of planning and construction, visitors to downtown Los Angeles can now enjoy Grand Park, a distinctive and highly diverse civic park filled with large, open spaces and beautifully designed gardens. Hundreds of trees and plantings representing three different continents literally provide a breath of fresh air into the hart of the city and its people. Grand Park stretches over an expansive, four-block, 12-acre site between The Music Center on the west, to City Hall on the east.
“For Grand Park, we worked to create a very public design that is both elegant and durable,” says Tony Paradowski, project designer at Rios Clementi Hale Studios. “One of the goals of the project is to restore the central visual axis to the Park, a design feature that was critical to the original symmetry of the Civic Mall. The various grand stairways that mark the central axis of the Park are lit using the V-Rail Handrail system from Intense Lighting to reinforce the central axis and distinguish the central stairways from the perimeter pathways.”
“We are always looking at ways to use products that are integrated into architectural elements,” says Lighting Designer Ronit Fraenkel, LEED, AP, of Lighting Design Alliance (LDA) of Long Beach, CA. “The V-Rail system offers an interesting design feature that worked well with our limited budget. It offers different color temperature options so we could maintain the warm, white light that is used throughout the park. They also offer various lumen outputs within the V-Rail line, so we achieved higher levels of light for safety purposes at various stairways.”