Speaking of awesome summer parks, New York-based architects West 8 recently won the competition to design the Sagrera Linear Park in Barcelona.  Like the newly opened Lincoln Park in Miami, this park is mind blowing, but in a different way. Its long, linear layout encompasses a whole city's worth of diversions, including several gardens, orchards, sculpture areas, sports fields, and on and on.

Barcelona--a city organized on its famous diagonals--has been on the cutting edge of public space design since it hosted the Summer Olympics in 1992, and with parks like this one it's continuing to be. And, like the other speculative parks we've seen this summer, the Sagrera Linear Park features some innovative, out-there ideas.

The park's great design stitches together a whole section of Barcelona, spanning a diagonal that crosses most of the city and making it most definitely Character Approved.

[Image: West 8]`