Parks for the People: A Student Competition to Reimagine America's National Parks
Competition Launch: August 2011
Competition Website: Parks for the People
Van Alen Institute is pleased to present Parks for the People: A Student Competition to Reimagine America’s National Parks. A collaborative initiative of Van Alen Institute, the U.S. National Park Service, and the National Parks Conservation Association, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, Parks for the People is a design competition that will reimagine America’s most spectacular public places— its national parks — by using design as a catalyst to creatively rethink their connections to people and their role as revered natural, social, and cultural destinations.
As a culminating project of Designing the Parks—a public-private partnership to promote well-designed public parks in America—the Parks for the People competition invites student and faculty teams to help build a common foundation of design principles for these extraordinary sites as the U.S. National Park Service embarks upon a new century of park design.
Participating student and faculty teams will work with park administrators to create model solutions for seven park sites in each geographic region of the U.S., and develop these design ideas as paradigms that can strengthen sites across the National Park System.
The competition will proceed in two distinct stages. During the first stage this fall, faculty in architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, planning, ecology, preservation, communications, and related fields will organize research teams and begin an investigation into one of seven national park sites around the nation as the focus of their studio proposal:
Northeast Region: Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, Elverson, PA
National Capital Region: Civil War Defenses of Washington, Washington, DC
Southeast Region: Biscayne National Park, Miami, FL
Southeast Region: Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, Atlanta, GA
Midwest Region: Nicodemus National Historic Site, Nicodemus, KS
Inter-Mountain Region: Valles Caldera National Preserve, Jemez Springs, NM
Pacific West Region: San Juan Island National Historical Park, Friday Harbor, WA
During the first competition stage, teams will submit a proposal for a Spring 2012 studio class based around one of the seven sites. From this pool of proposals, seven student and faculty teams (one chosen for each of the seven regional parks) will be selected to proceed to the second competition stage and participate in a Spring 2012 semester design studio.
Visit the competition website for full details—and help create a new generation of welcoming, meaningful, healthy, and enduring national parks.
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