Frank Villalobos '70, Architecture
President, Barrio Planners

	"Barrio Planners was founded with the intent of coming back to the neighborhood and instigating change through environmental design, landscape architecture and community involvement."

Nearly 25 years ago, five Cal Poly Pomona architecture and landscape architecture students took the lessons they’d learned in the college classroom about serving the community through design, returned to their neighborhoods in East Los Angeles and launched their careers. Together they founded the nonprofit Barrio Planners.

“We gave it a ’60s-style name so that it would be recognized and have a better image within the community,” says Frank Villalobos, who is president of the firm. “Barrio Planners was founded with the intent of coming back to the neighborhood and instigating change through environmental design, andscape architecture and community involvement.”

The Cal Poly Pomona-educated founders, Raul Escobedo, Manuel Orozco, David Angelo and Villalobos, achieved immediate success in their formula of including the community in their design and planning.

“We had the opportunity to redesign a public park in Pomona that had been taken over by the Sharky gang, so we got their input along with the community, incorporated a modernistic Mexican design and named it Sharky Park.”

In 1974, they won a national award for the project’s design, leading to many other park projects in the early years.

“We have included community input in all of our designs since then,” says Villalobos, who received his bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1970.

In recognition of this service to society, Villalobos was honored this year as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the profession.

With the firm’s commitment to community in mind, Villalobos has had a front-row seat to the social, political and economic realities of East L.A. during the last three decades.

“A lot of people who search for a place to settle down usually will choose where they want to live by whatever economics it takes to get there. East L.A. is a port of entry from Mexico. It’s a transitional community, and people leave once they are more affluent.

“What we saw at that time was local people suffering from a lack of political representation, and as a result, seven freeways were built right through East L.A.,” he says, which consistently uprooted and displaced residents. “We resented that we all grew up there having to move to make room for the freeways and then having to move again.”

To combat the blight, Barrio Planners helped create Ramona Gardens Park using community input and successful design. With pride of ownership, the neighborhood took care of the park. But the synergy was doomed when yet another freeway was planned to raze the green space.

“Barrio Planners sued California Department of Highways, and we were able to keep the park,” says Villalobos, but ultimately the government came back, exercised eminent domain, tore down the surrounding homes and built the freeway anyway, leaving a park today with no neighborhood to enjoy it.

With the groundswell of community support they’d cultivated from the time they first planned the park and the realization of how important their leadership had been in the fight to save the property, albeit an overall defeat, Barrio Planners decided to become a for-profit business in 1982.

“We incorporated, so we could participate in political activism. And honestly, being a nonprofit design center barely paid the bills.” They were now able to compete with other firms for larger projects.

While Barrio Planners still concentrates on projects that serve the community, the scale has greatly increased. Today, in a joint venture with two other firms, Barrio Planners is part of Eastside LRT Partners, and Villalobos is the lead architect responsible for the design of the Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension stations, which will be completed in 2009.

The lessons of Ramona Gardens Park remain in the firm’s mission. A year ago, a Barrio Planners’ project headed by cofounder Escobedo ‘68 and Luz Maria Chavez ‘86 — the expansion of White Memorial General Hospital — was completed. And while the facility’s capacity increased, and the physical plant was enlarged, the surrounding community not only provided input for the master plan, but also the neighborhood remained intact.

“The hospital respected its boundaries, and the design didn’t require acquisition of property outside its ownership.

“In every one of our projects we keep the community as the No. 1 client even though they aren’t the ones paying for it,” says Villalobos.

“But they are the ones who will ultimately inherit the property as a landmark.”