6 Open News Black Sands California’s Central Park

FÖDA and Gensler create a materially rich interior for chef Aaron Bludorn’s latest venture.

SWA Group shares a comprehensive master plan for Irvine’s unfinished Great Park.

Seventeen years after Ken Smith Workshop’s master plan for Irvine, California’s Great Park was approved, an updated scheme will envision a new era for the park.

SWA Group’s Laguna Beach studio has released its plans for the 1,200-acre Orange County park, working with local planning and urban design firm Kellenberg Studio.

Currently, the park features a visitors center, an outdoor agricultural classroom, a water park, extensive athletic facilities, an arts complex, considerable parking space, and 1.5 miles of pedestrian and cycling trails, which will soon be joined by an amphitheater, a museum complex, a botanical garden, and a public library.

Built on the site of the former Marine Corps El Toro Air Station, the park has been long envisioned as California’s Central Park. A 2006 design competition, won by Ken Smith Workshop, brought forth a new vision for the park. While some parts of the park came to fruition, including an often-photographed orange hot air balloon ride, the full plan was never realized.

The park has become a fixture in local politics. In a deposition, a worker from the construction management company MCK, which performed program and construction management and filled advisory roles on the project, described aspects of Smith’s design as impractical. This included a manmade lake that would have required the Navy to clean up contaminated groundwater and the redirection of water into a wildlife corridor. The Smith plan also included an artificial canyon.

Navy Blue

2445 Times Boulevard

Houston

713-347-7727 navybluerestaurant.com

Over time, Rice Village, an eclectic, tree-lined Houston shopping center that originated in the late 1930s and ’40s, has grown into a beloved (and periodically down-at-the-heels) destination for nearby residents, hobbyists, college students, home-goods shoppers, moviegoers, and diner patrons. Beginning in 2018, public space upgrades like covered outdoor seating, landscaping, and widened sidewalks have attracted new upscale shops and restaurants to open amid decades-old favorite haunts, bringing a renewed vibrancy to the district.

Navy Blue, a new seafood restaurant concept helmed by Aaron Bludorn, a veteran of New York’s Café Boulud and operator of his eponymous restaurant in Houston, opened late last year. The eatery represents the latest entry in the Village’s refashioning into a fancy Houston destination. Designed by Austin-based brand consultancy and design studio FÖDA in close collaboration with Gensler, the restaurant has transformed a former food hall into an expressive dining room. (FÖDA also worked with chef Bludorn on the design of his prior venture, his first in Houston.)

Upon entering, diners are greeted by an oyster shell–inspired reception area perforated with circular apertures, in accidental homage to Jean Prouvé. Curved bays of deep blue Japanese tile and tall white oak planks differentiate upholstered banquettes and tables in the dining room, which is served by a show kitchen, from the seating areas around the bar; both are surfaced in white Japanese tile.

The design leaves the concrete structure exposed. Above, the ducting and concrete are offset by jellyfish-like wire lamps. Glimmering tiles on the exterior facade and glowing chartreuse tiles in the bathroom areas strategically animate the walls. Throughout, subtle elements (like hidden mirrors to accentuate handblown glass pendant lights in the booths) and discreet space planning (to ease natural circulation in the dining room and offer the servers view corridors while concealing them from guests) afford a refined dining experience.

“The working title for this project was Black Sands,” Jett Butler, founder and chief creative officer of FÖDA, told AN . (Prior to starting the office in 2003, he studied architecture.) “We used this prompt to avoid nautical kitsch; instead, we centered on that moment where the raw, visceral nature of the sea collides with the land.”

Butler continued: “The booths curl into one another in waves of tile, the frames of the oak center planes curve inward into themselves, breeze-blocks emerge as a cylinder with circular perforations that cast layered ellipses on the floor, the flowing script of the menus is hand drawn and spaced with nautilus shell ratios.... The room is simple, the gestures are spare. Yet Navy Blue is loaded with subtle symbolism.”

The concept—and the cuisine, of course— has already won over critics: Writing in Texas Monthly in March, Patricia Sharpe proclaimed that “Navy Blue is the best restaurant to open in Texas in the past year.”

After Governor Jerry Brown shut down California’s municipal development agencies in 2011, the city lost a potential funding source for the park. The city then negotiated with a development company, FivePoint, to construct high-end single-family housing around the park. FivePoint had already been working with the city on the park’s development, and after the state-level changes were passed, Irvine allowed FivePoint to triple the number of houses being built in the area surrounding the park. The housing scheme was key to the plan not only in terms of the city relinquishing a degree of control over the larger project to a private developer but also in that homeowners in the neighborhood adjacent to the park pay additional taxes for infrastructure development through a Mello-Roos scheme.

In July 2022 the Irvine City Council approved a new plan for the park. Funding will continue to come from the Mello-Roos scheme and bonds, with some of the park’s original promises coming back into development.

SWA’s plan breaks the park into five sections: The Heart of the Park will include an amphitheater that could hold 12,000 seats, a farm, and lakes; the Cultural Terrace will convert existing hangars, alongside new construction, into a museum complex; a botanical garden and Veterans Memorial Park will include a public library and “living laboratory” for species native to Southern California; the Bosque will be “a sculpted linear park of naturalized landscape trails, playgrounds, and native California chaparral”; and a 200acre sports park will complete the plan.

SWA’s design for the lake system covers 22 acres. The forest reserve and botanical garden will cover an additional 40 and 60 acres, respectively. A large promenade will connect the park’s five components and will include tram stops and bike storage facilities. This is key, as the Irvine Transportation Center is located across from the southwest side of the park.

SWA managing principal Sean O’Malley described the park as an act of hope: “Planting trees and planning this endeavor is an investment in our future.” Chris Walton