Parks for the People: A Design Studio Competition

Van Alen Institute is pleased to announce the launch of Parks for the People: A Student Competition to Reimagine America's National Parks. This landmark design competition for the National Park Service 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.

This student competition is part of Designing the Parks—a partnership to promote well-designed public parks in America—and calls on faculty and student teams from design schools across the nation to help build a common foundation of design principles for these extraordinary sites as the National Park Service embarks upon a new century of park design.

Today, our parks are facing unprecedented challenges—shifting demographics, climate change, and economic constraints. How we plan and design in response to these changing imperatives will have an enormous impact on how successful we are at creating welcoming, meaningful, healthy, and enduring public places that last well into the future.

To get there, we're inviting faculty from architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, planning, preservation, and the graphic arts to join with colleagues in the environmental and social sciences, landscape ecology, communications, and other fields to create model solutions for the National Park System. This fall, schools will select one of seven national parks across America as the basis for their proposal. Seven finalist teams will be named in December—one for each national park site—and develop their designs during Spring 2012 studios. The winning teams will be nationally celebrated next summer and contribute to a legacy of design excellence in our nation's public spaces.

Visit the competition website for full details, and follow the project's Twitter feed for updates and announcements. And most of all, join us! Spread the word to your fellow students, faculty members, research fellows, and school leadership about this initiative, and bring your unbounded creativity to imagine what national parks can be in the twenty-first century.