Landscape design firm Hargreaves Associates has released renderings of its new vision for Philadelphia’s iconic John F. Kennedy Plaza, commonly known as Love Park. The space is home to Robert Indiana’s Love sculpture and a round midcentury building that currently serves as a city welcome center, both of which were critical in the redesign.
Creating a new plan for Love Park was not an easy task. The public’s popular opinion, as voiced by nearly a thousand of the city’s residents in a series of open meetings, was to allow the round building and a massive fountain, which serves as the backdrop for Indiana’s sculpture, to remain on-site. Heeding the plea, the designers will keep both features, though the welcome center will be renovated (and perhaps turned into a dining facility) by Philadelphia-based architecture firm Kieran Timberlake.
Additionally, the plan needed to deal with the grade of the site, which slopes down about eight feet from one side to the other. Its current design incorporates a series of terraces that form abrupt walls at the park’s perimeter, making it difficult to see into or enter the plaza. The Hargreaves plan will remove the unsightly terraces to create a unified, gentle pitch crossed by easily accessible paths that begin at each of the park’s four corners. The redesign will be complete in 2017.
Love Park is located between N. 15th Street and N. 16th Street along John F. Kennedy Boulevard in Philadelphia.
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