Zócalo Public Square

Will downtown L.A. ever work? It’s already working, said a four-person panel of architects, planners, and designers who’ve been closely involved with downtown over the past decade. At an event in L.A.'s Grand Park, landscape architect Tony Paradowski, urban designer Melani Smith, SCI-Arc's Hernan Diaz Alonso, and architect Alice Kimm spoke with moderator Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, about why they feel downtown has at last arrived and what the future might hold.