Project Data:

Completion Date:     9/3/2026

Square Footage:      6100

Building Use:           Aquatic Center

Project Description:

For generations, Santa Ana’s Memorial Park has been a beloved venue for countless memories and gatherings set among its expansive green space and gracious heritage trees. But, after 75 years of intensive recreational use, the 16-acre site is showing its age. And its 1956 pool, the city’s largest, is failing. Now comes a replacement aquatic center and two-phase park master plan that will transform the site while retaining its bucolic spirit and legacy of civic importance.

By addressing the facility and park together, designers could think holistically, using broad gestures to balance beauty and function. The work reinforces Santa Ana’s civic pride by celebrating the park’s best features and restoring its role as a vital neighborhood destination, crowned by a richly programmed venue whose all-electric operations place it among the first all-electric aquatic centers in California.

The community engagement process turned an early challenge into a remarkable success. Facing an under-representation of families and young people at public workshops, designers asked school leaders to connect them directly with students and caregivers, bringing roughly 500 new voices to the project. Countering the city’s original vision, this enthusiastic stakeholder group requested that the proposed 50m pool become two smaller pools, and – despite the $10MM cost implication – that the center’s two construction phases become one. City officials agreed. This demonstrates how, when a public process prioritizes inclusion, it leads to expanded feedback and a stronger project.

While bold in form, the facility fits comfortably into its low-rise neighborhood. A sawtooth roofline acknowledges the gables of nearby single-family homes and recalls Orange County’s bygone agricultural warehouses; north-facing windows achieve passive ventilation (through the stack effect) and fill interior spaces with diffuse daylight. The color palette, resembling that of a nearby school, helps create a civic-core feel. Through a striking central breezeway entry, visitors encounter a bustling activity pool with a waterslide and lap pool beyond. Resort-like shade trellises and terraced bleacher seating surround the deck. All-electric operations (even for pool heating) reduce ongoing costs while minimizing carbon emissions – a rarity for aquatic centers.

Supporting the facility, the plan retains the park’s heritage trees and folds the requested contemporary programming into existing uses. The aquatic center is bordered by a lush orchard of new citrus trees, tying the site to the agriculture that once defined Orange County and further articulating the park’s many activity zones.

While retaining the original sweeping and symmetrical arced pathways that connect the park’s four corners, the project re-organizes the park, clearing out its perimeter for passive uses and concentrating intensive uses into a central axis comprising the aquatic center and existing bandshell, and, in Phase 2, a splash pad, rose garden, and gymnasium, along with a memorial for remembrance and reflection.

As vital expressions of Chicano identity, murals are essential to the region’s cultural landscape. The project preserves two existing murals (by Emigdio Vasquez and Roberto Del Hoyo) that, like the renewal of Memorial Park itself, demonstrate the profound value that Santa Ana places on civic heritage.

Design for Integration, Design for Equitable Communities, Design for Ecosystems, Design for Water , Design for Economy, Design for Energy, Design for Well-being, Design for Change 

DESIGN FOR INTEGRATION

This project’s “big idea” was to balance the ideals of beauty with functional demands. The design team sought to honor the park’s history and maintain its essence while delivering a new aquatics center crowning the modernized site. A new Master Plan preserves mature landscaping, the existing bandshell, and two important murals by locally renowned Chicano artists Emigdio Vasquez and Roberto Del Hoyo.

Form, material, and color define a building that enjoys numerous connections to its context, integrating the sloped roof forms of the nearby homes, the region’s agricultural history, and a material and color that, in complimenting the nearby Washington Elementary, helps establish a civic core.

The building’s use of natural light creates healthy, daylit spaces and reduces the need for artificial lighting, lowering electricity demands and operational costs.

DESIGN FOR ENERGY

Daylighting is part of a broader goal to reduce energy use. The all-electric facility (including pool heating), reflects the importance of moving away from natural gas boilers. Photovoltaic panels produce on-site renewable energy.

North-facing windows provide abundant diffuse natural light, reducing reliance on artificial lighting and daytime power demand. In times of sufficient daylighting, daylight sensors will inform the Building Management System to automatically turn off unneeded lights.

All-electric operations and PV arrays are an educational tool demonstrating the value of sustainable design to the public.

DESIGN FOR EQUITABLE COMMUNITIES

Through its enticing programming and focus on recreation and fitness, this project affects countless residents and the broader community for decades into the future.

The design team creatively overcame early challenges to lead a robust community engagement effort that integrated essential input from a younger audience and those who do not typically attend public-design workshops.

The design team recognized that the people who most urgently need to learn how to swim are often the most difficult to reach. By appealing to local school leadership to reach out to students and their caretakers, the design team was able to take the engagement process directly to the people who had the greatest stake in the project. This helped ensure the design of a facility that reflected the needs of the whole community, not just of those that are the most passionate or vocal.

The project preserves and celebrates two murals including Chicano Gothic, by Emigdio Vasquez. Painted in 1987 for the existing pool facility, this important piece of Santa Ana’s culture will be reinforced and restored in its original location and incorporated into the overall park master plan. The effort gives greater prominence to the mural, turning it into an entry marker that welcomes people into the reimagined Memorial Park.

DESIGN FOR ECOSYSTEMS

The overall master plan and all-electric Phase 1 aquatic center recognize the importance of the existing trees and are designed to retain as many as possible. This work follows a cohesive sustainability strategy that helps to support ecological health over time. Embedded in the master plan are requirements to maintain the mature landscape, select new drought-tolerant plants, and promote biodiversity and resilience.

The park utilizes the existing parking lot and aims to keep the row of existing ficus trees on the park’s eastern edge, while also adding new trees and shrub plantings. New plants will be selected to be drought-tolerant and climate-appropriate while prioritizing aesthetic quality, flowering ability, and ease of maintenance. A diverse palette of plants will be selected to promote biodiversity and future resilience.

DESIGN FOR WATER

The project sought to conserve and improve the site’s precious water resources. Drought-tolerant landscaping conserves irrigation water; bioswales and retention basins treat all stormwater and improve water quality. Low-flow plumbing fixtures conserve potable water. Site strategies use buffers to create a favorable environment for aquatics, including tall hedges and trees surrounding the pool enclosure to reduce wind and thus reduce evaporation from the two pools, ultimately helping to conserve water.

DESIGN FOR ECONOMY

The project seeks to offset short-term cost with long-term value. Its all-electric infrastructure represents a higher upfront cost and ultimately reflects the most affordable solution over the building’s lifecycle. The design follows a phased master plan in which the Phase 1 aquatics center fits seamlessly into a larger master plan that will be built out later, as funding becomes available.

The project offers two pools instead of a single 50m pool. The two-pool strategy is more cost effective than building a 50m pool, while providing a similar amount of water area, broader community use, and greater programming opportunities.

DESIGN FOR WELL-BEING

Through its emphasis on using aquatics programming to encourage fitness and healthy lifestyles, improve regional health outcomes, and maximize overall well-being, the project offers clear benefits to the people of Santa Ana, regardless of whether they are pool users. In numerous ways, the building connects with nature, for example through abundant, diffuse natural light that promotes the building’s spaces as welcoming and healthy. Its building materials (adhesives, sealants, paints, coatings, carpet) all observe Low VOC requirements.

DESIGN FOR CHANGE

Adaptability is a key feature of any project that is designed around all-electric operations. All-electric operations reduce a project’s susceptibility to volatile factors related to the cost and supply of natural gas. Given the ongoing regional threat of wildfires, the project is constructed of fire-resistant materials. The aquatics complex functions well on its own or as part of its larger master plan. Over the coming generations of change, the site will continue to present a flexible framework for future development, without needing to rely on future funding and outcomes to achieve its successes.

Completion Date:     9/3/2026

Square Footage:      6100

Building Use:           Aquatic Center

Location:                 Santa Ana, CA