NPCA is a proud sponsor of Designing the Parks Conference. NPCA's Envisioning Gateway: A Design Competition for Gateway National Park will be one of the topics at the Second Part of the conference in San Francisco.
Part 1: The History of Park Planning and Design
May 20-22, 2008
Charlottesville, Virginia
Part 2: The Present and Future of Park Planning and Design
December 9-11, 2008
San Francisco, California
The Charlottesville (Part I) and San Francisco (Part II) sessions of Designing the Parks will be linked in terms of content, themes, participants, and mutual relevance.
At both sessions, participants will include architects and landscape architects, historians, scientists, national and state park managers, partnership organizations, and others involved in park research, design, and management.
Many types of landscape reservations will be the subjects of papers and presentations at both meetings of Designing the Parks, including but not limited to scenic and wilderness reservations, historical and archeological parks, ethnographic and memorial sites, national heritage areas, and protected landscapes of all types.
The purpose of the Charlottesville sessions are to assess lessons learned through an examination of park planning and design history. The research presented will provide a foundation for presentations and workshops addressing the unique challenges facing current park design and management, which will be the subjects of the San Francisco meeting of the conference. The goal of the San Francisco session is to formulate design principles that will guide the NPS and other park managers as they embrace these new challenges and opportunities. Following the San Francisco sessions, graduate schools of design will be invited to apply these principles in design studios to test and validate their conceptual application to future park design.
For more information, please visit http://www.designingtheparks.com
