Inspired by the city’s rich history of aerospace research and manufacturing, Lynwood Mega-Playground brings a dynamic space exploration-themed playground to the heart of the Central Los Angeles city.
Completed in Fall 2024, the playground transforms the Northwest corner of Lynwood Park into a colorful spectacle with super-sized play features including a 22-foot-wide sphere inspired by Saturn’s rings, a 30-foot-high rocket structure, and an 86-foot “constellation walk” meandering through the site. Throughout, the design prioritizes sustainability with low-carbon concrete, engineered wood fiber play surfacing, and structures built with post-consumer recycled materials. The same priorities extend through planting design through drought-tolerant shade plants, native trees, and supportive species for birds, insects, and wildlife.
Capturing Lynwood history in striking physical form, the Mega-Playground serves as an afterschool hub for students, bringing STEM education into the outdoors. To this day, the majority Latinx city plays a crucial role in supporting space exploration technologies—an industry that dates back to the 1950s, when aerospace innovators clustered in the South Bay area.
The project is the latest in a series of transformative open space investments including the SWA-designed Ricardo Lara Park, completed in 2015, and Fernwood Avenue Park, completed in 2023.
Park 101
The ambitious Park 101 aims to cover part of downtown Los Angeles’ 101 Freeway with a multi-purpose park that will include playgrounds, seating, festival areas, and a plaza. The approximately four-block cap park will reconnect the two sections of Downtown that have long been separated by the freeway, greatly enhancing the currently noisy, with much-needed shad...
Tulsa Riverfront Park
SWA directed conceptual studies for incorporating a landmark residential estate, a multi-family housing complex and a creek corridor into the adjacent Arkansas River waterfront of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Recently acquired by a local community foundation, the total 64-acre area features sweeping lawns and a historic home that provides much-needed space for the city’s ...
Golden Gate National Recreation Area
In the early 1970s, the National Park Service began the enormous task of creating a new national recreation area in the midst of an urban center—the San Francisco Bay Area, home to 4.5 million people at the time. Riding the wake of the environmental revolution of the late 1960s, the Park Service would need to find consensus among a wide range of constituents, ...
Palisades Park
Santa Monica’s famous pier area draws visitors who often disregard pavement boundaries and compact the landscape soil. Palisades Park, adjacent to the iconic pier, is a particularly active site for cyclists and tourists that has long been in need of a planting strategy to discourage pedestrian overflow into the landscape. SWA’s defensive planting strategy tack...