LA28 Olympic Gateway | El Segundo Gateway
100 N. Imperial Hwy El Segundo, CA 90245
El Segundo, California

 View of the gateway from Imperial Hwy, heading west towards the Pacific Ocean.

Historical Context of Main Street and Imperial Highway - Gateway to El Segundo.
“Open spaces... The welcome wagons...thatʼs what we love about El Segundo. Now it is the heart of one of the business capital centers of the world...” - 1997 El Segundo TV “Short History of El Segundo”

Restoration is grounded in the material and cultural conditions of this site: Tongva land practices, refinery and airport impacts, and the fragmented habitat of the El Segundo Blue Butterfly. Restoration here is procedural rather than symbolic, oriented toward reactivating interrupted ecological relations. The native Tongva’s understood material and shapes and rendering of existing conditions and understanding into the schematic design process.

Landlocked at one of the prominent spaces of Southern California, El Segundo is one of the main cities that one witnesses upon their arrival to LA.

Project Description
LA28 Olympic Gateway | El Segundo Gateway

The El Segundo Gateway project initially operated at the scale of a modest but strategically positioned urban threshold: a 0.22-mile-long (approximately 1,160 linear feet) and 70–85-foot-wide public right-of-way at the western edge of the El Segundo neighborhood, encompassing roughly 1.7 acres of streetscape, remnant planting strips, utility easements, and transitional verge spaces; which later expanded analytically to include the 10.8 acre left over corridor strip, the defines the boundary of the city of El Segundo from Los Angeles Airport (LAX). Although limited in area, the site is embedded within a dense constellation of regional infrastructures whose ecological and social impacts far exceed the boundaries of the design brief. The project’s scale is therefore deliberately leveraged as a catalyst; an incision through which reparative ecological processes may begin to take hold.

The design commission, issued by the City of El Segundo, was defined as an improvement to a neighborhood entry corridor, with programmatic goals centered on traffic calming, pedestrian safety, native planting, and the creation of a cohesive identity for the northern gateway. These constraints necessarily limited the intervention to the public right-of-way and precluded modifications to adjacent parcels, utility corridors, or privately owned industrial lands. Within this framework, the project seeks to demonstrate how a streetscape, often relegated to infrastructural maintenance and aesthetic enhancement, can operate as a site of ecological repair and cultural acknowledgment. Immediately east of the site, the residential fabric of El Segundo begins, a compact neighborhood shaped historically by the workforce of Chevron and, later, LAX. The project’s role as a gateway means it must negotiate between industrial edges and domestic life, absorbing environmental pressures while offering a threshold that is safe, legible, and ecologically generative. The corridor thus becomes a hinge: between the industrial and the domestic, the infrastructural and the ecological, the contemporary neighborhood and the deeper histories of Tongva stewardship.

Design Concept
Filled with a rich historical context of land that was previously owned by corn farmers, later turned into a refinery town, through Chevron and now home to some of the world's most renowned technological and sports industry, like Boeing and the L.A. Lakers. The city’s fabrication is now obsolete and in need of a vision for the future. El Segundo Gateway is the first representation, a symbolic entrance, introducing everything the city represents: engaging, inspiring + playful.  “Flight” is a gateway, artwork, and community gathering place, sited at the threshold of LAX airport, the City of El Segundo, and the Imperial Highway. “Flight” is a place inclusive of day and night activations. Through planting and lighting, the gateway extends, forming an ecological runway to the Pacific Ocean. This diurnal photoreceptive pollinator corridor is intended to regenerate the indigenous habitat of the threatened, native Blue Butterfly. Our vision engages the spectacle of the airport, the gateway, the butterfly, the community who inhabit and circulate through the site, and the ecological regeneration of indigenous flora and fauna using technology in a contemporary setting.

Site Preservation + Restoration
The site boundary extends from the intersection at the neighborhood’s western threshold eastward toward residential streets. The corridor is positioned at a uniquely layered point of convergence between regional mega-infrastructures and local lived environments. Immediately to the north, the runways and fuel logistics of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) define the atmospheric and acoustic conditions of the site, producing persistent noise, particulate emissions, and airfield microclimates. To the south and southwest, the Chevron El Segundo Refinery, one of the largest petroleum-processing complexes on the West Coast, generates its own environmental burdens: heat islands, fugitive emissions, and ecological fragmentation, that directly shape the neighborhood’s ecological baseline. Within this heavily infrastructural context lies a small but significant ecological neighbor: the El Segundo blue butterfly (Euphilotes battoides allyni) preserve, maintained on Chevron-owned land. The preserve protects the federally endangered species whose life cycle depends exclusively on Seacliff Buckwheat (Eriogonum parvifolium), a plant once widespread along this coast but now surviving in fragmented patches. Although not contiguous with the project site, the preserve sits within the ecological catchment of the corridor. Its presence frames a critical question for the project: how might a linear streetscape serve as a connective habitat corridor, expanding the conditions necessary for the blue butterfly’s survival beyond the fenced boundaries of the preserve?

Project Team:
Collaborators:
Consultants:
Publication: The Plan Journal