Architect Of The Next Great Urban Park

"With a postmodern penchant for plastic flowers and a résumé of urban park space, Ken Smith isn't the first landscape architect you'd think of to design the Orange County Great Park...his team had won the job of transforming the abandoned El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Irvine into a park bigger than Central Park with an ambitious name to match, the Orange County Great Park....he discovered Earth Days and landscape architecture classes in the [Iowa State] agriculture school and, in the library, the writings of Robert Smithson, the pioneering earthworks artist, and Andy Warhol, whose idea of the natural was commercial ready-made stuff sold at the corner store. Years later, when New York's Museum of Modern Art was being remodeled and Smith was asked to design its roof garden, his first proposal was to create a field of plastic daisies â€" cheap fake daisies that twirled in the wind."