We see the river as a channel for receiving light and a conduit for wind in an otherwise hot and stifling environment.  Within the space you are transported from everyday life of the city into a strangely calm, serene, and sublime place.  The unnaturalness of the channel makes the experience of light, wind, sky, and water so much more vivid.  As we seek to humanize and inhabit the space of the river, we want to preserve this quality. 

The new structures and new walkway are subtly colored to intensify and reflect the quality of the Los Angeles light against the sky.  This strategy was derived from the Ocean Park paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, in which the artist painted the colors of the air within an abstract grid of streets and built elements.  Our structures, in a sense, become built manifestations of these paintings.  The project becomes a three-dimensional composition of form, color and light, perceptible from the car and the pedestrian, bridging the scale of the city, infrastructure and the individual.  From the car and from the eye in the sky, the channel is a linear sculpture.  For the human on the ground, it creates a space to do something new, part of a linear forum connecting neighborhoods across the city.