Sticks & Stones / Steel & Glass. Anthony Poon

      Prelude

      Sunset over Hermosa Beach

      I can’t do what ten people tell me to do. So I guess I’ll remain the same.

      OTIS REDDING AND STEVE CROPPER

      We won the competition—three times. And we lost—three times!

      The three-year affair known as the Hermosa Beach Pier design competition of the early nineties was mostly a hard lesson in personal naïveté, civic dithering, and professional backstabbing. The sunny part of it, however, was that it enabled my design partner and me to engage in an aspect of architecture—public space—that is not discussed as passionately as are tangible exhilarating structures of steel and glass.

      Public space is architecture that is shared by all who encounter it directly or who live or work nearby, not just by the inhabitants of a home or office. An individual, a group, a community—they all share and flourish in a public space, no matter how small. I’m not talking just about the great parks of the world, the lungs and soul of any city; they are of course essential to people of all means to spend an afternoon surrounded by trees and grass, away from concrete and noise.

      I’m obsessed with plazas, vest-pocket parks, and expanded thoroughfares that give us five, ten, thirty minutes of respite. Even passing by a well-designed urban oasis can calm or energize us. To open up, look up, look around . . . before rushing on to the next destination.

      For my early architectural studies, I conducted yearlong research into the public square that defined my growing up: San Francisco’s Portsmouth Square. Often called the “Heart of Chinatown,” it shaped how I look at a city and at how people gather within it.

      Portsmouth Square was carved out of the dense urban environment of Chinatown’s old buildings. As a child, I climbed its play equipment; as a youth, I met my friends there after hours; as an adult, I celebrated my wedding there. Imagine my wife’s bright white silk wedding dress against the gritty and grainy city backdrop, people on aged benches staring at us with curiosity, and the old men playing chess, not missing a strategic move, undistracted by a wedding party in tuxedos and gowns. Years later, my children would play in the same recreational areas of that venerable public space.

      My photographs of Portsmouth Square went on exhibit at UC Berkeley and were later included in a book titled People Places: Design Guidelines for Urban Open Spaces. That vital public park imprinted on me. And it has informed much of my career’s work.

      As I backpacked through Europe during college, the piazzas, church squares, and gardens struck me collectively as an elemental form of architecture. I expected it, truth be told, but in the Piazza del Campo in Siena, I witnessed a civic jam session: children playing impromptu sports, groups dancing to live music, raucous political debates, benchlong napping, art students hocking their colorful creations, and one very romantic couple—and then me, the tourist and student in awe of how all this came together.

      The final composition of a public space should boom with the splendor of a city performing on stage for the world to witness. As a city-scale work of cultural and social art, a public space and the activities within it are an expression of a community that is alive.

      Southern California in 1992. Economic times were tough, but the sun always shone. We were young, Greg Lombardi and I. I was twenty-eight and he thirty.

      We formed a partnership, but we didn’t go the artificial acronym route fancied by our colleagues. For us, there would be no OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), FOA (Foreign Office Architects), or the illustrious Office dA (de, as in from Architecture?) in Boston. Our fancy name? Lombardi/Poon Associates.

      Years later, when we obtained our state licenses as architects,

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