To reimagine how people see and think about public space, I directed a short film and web series about a contested park in Downtown LA that reveals an inclusive vision for its future through the eyes and memories of its users.
In the footsteps of many unique Angelenos, a down-on-her-luck woman finds a new identity in Pershing Square, a notoriously unloved space in Downtown Los Angeles. (19:40)
Role Writer, Director
For MIT DUSP
Date 2018
Service strategy, research, engagement, content, campaign
“The film has a sense of history and memory that is sorely missing in conversations about public space in Los Angeles”
Watch as Episodes
How do you awaken the hidden spirit of a public space?
Hostile, outdated, unloved: this is the popular image of Pershing Square in Downtown Los Angeles. Yet beneath the sun-baked surfaces of this historic park exist countless stories of refuge and reinvention. Redemption Square is an investigation of the soul of a park and the soul of a city, and of a major perceptual gap in Los Angeles that propels vicious cycles of demolition and misguided urban design.
Cinematic Experiments
I chose Pershing Square as a case study to test the use of film as an urban design tool for my MIT master’s thesis in 2016. Concurrent with an international competition to redesign the park, my experiments involved conducting nearly 100 interviews with park users, “reenacting” the experiences of users in every generation back to the 1860s, and constructing a possible future of the park through a montage of user aspirations.
Listening to Place
After grad school, I decided to approach this project more like an artist, playing with the tone and having fun with making something I’d want to watch. I teamed up with two women I’d met who offered totally unique understandings of this place, and their stories became metaphors for communicating a shared feeling we had about space and transformation.
The project’s main theme of redemption came from letting go of trying to critique or design the park, and just listening to what the place was trying to say.
“Now I feel that you connect to me as a human being and a woman that lives on this planet with me.”
Crossing the Divide
I was happy that the film made a splash in the design community: screening at design-related festivals around the world (including in Tehran, Iran!), winning awards at several LA-based film festivals, and the short episodes were even used as templates for students’ final projects in a seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Beyond LA, I believe that the value of Redemption Square lies in its argument that the salvation of a city’s public life lies not in strict adherence to nostalgia or reinvention, but in the ability for politicians to tune into the stories of refuge and reinvention that are happening every day in parks like Pershing Square, regardless of their physical design.
2018 panel discussion featuring myself and the star of the film, Lorraine Morland. (read the article...)
Press
ArchDaily article by Tom Dobbins, May 2018
Credits
Producer Anne Whiston Spirn
Starring Lorraine Morland, Lisa Biagiotti
Cinematography Drew Ganyer, Garrett Lamb, John Moody
Original Music Nicholas Myers, Colin Yarck
Motion Graphics John Cranston, David Vega-Barachowitz, John Moody
Sound Design Colin Yarck