The Green New Deal Superstudio: An Open Call
Now more than ever, we must use our unique training as designers to confront the pressing challenges of climate change and justice. The Green New Deal Superstudio allowed participants to explore these principles from a designer’s perspective and support this opportunity for change. The Superstudio ran from August 2020 through June 2021 and attracted the participation of more than 180 studio courses from over 90 universities as well as hundreds of practitioners and industry partners across the design disciplines.
Some 670 projects were submitted, ranging from adaptive reuse of degraded sites to regional-scale frameworks to visualizations of speculative futures. The work has been curated to support advocates to advance Green New Deal ideas and approaches and also informed a national conversation on policy and design at the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s summit in April 2022.
Explore the Green New Deal Superstudio Projects
The Superstudio was a concerted effort to give form to policy ideas by translating the core goals of decarbonization, justice, and jobs into place-specific design and planning projects. Some 670 projects were submitted.
The full set of submissions are catalogued as part of the Green New Deal Superstudio archive in the JSTOR digital library, where they are freely accessible.
A curated set of 55 projects can be viewed on the Superstudio website. These projects were selected to illustrate the range of work submitted and catalyze conversation.
We invite you to explore the submissions and join the discourse about how designers can meaningfully engage in a response to the climate crisis.
Superstudio Spotlight Webinar Series
These free webinars featured designers who participated in the Green New Deal Superstudio discussing their projects and approaches. Watch the recordings to get a glimpse of the wide variety of work done to explore what the principles and policy ideas mean from a designer's perspective.
Engaging Teens in the Re-Envisioning of Franklin Park (Jul 2021)
OLIN Labs Year of the Green New Deal (Aug 2021)
Workforce Development through Green Infrastructure (Nov 2021)
Envisioning a Green New Deal in 5 Studios at WashU (Dec 2021)
Wildfires and Landscape Strategies for Jobs, Justice, and Decarbonization (Feb 2022)
Superstudio Showcase Virtual Event
On October 28, we held a virtual event to celebrate and reflect on the Green New Deal Superstudio. Four of those tasked with reviewing and curating the 670 project submissions critically reflected on the body of work, highlighted key themes, and showed representative examples.
Presenters
- Barbara Deutsch, Landscape Architecture Foundation
- Kate Orff, SCAPE, Columbia University
- Kofi Boone, North Carolina State University
- Kristina Hill, University of California, Berkeley
- Michael Johnson, SmithGroup
- Roberto Rovira, Florida International University
This event was the first in a series of conversations about how designers can meaningfully engage in a response to the climate crisis at local, regional, and national levels.
The Green New Deal Superstudio was a national call and conversation about how the framework of the Green New Deal can be translated into design and planning projects, where they should take place, what will they look like, and who will they serve.
The Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) in association with the Weitzman School of Design McHarg Center, the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) invited designers to be part of a historic, national initiative to translate the core goals of the Green New Deal—decarbonization, justice, and jobs—into design and planning projects for their respective regions.
The Superstudio was an open call for designs that spatially manifest the principles and policy ideas of the Green New Deal with regional and local specificity. A national climate plan like the Green New Deal will be understood by most people through the landscapes, buildings, infrastructures, and public works agenda that it inspires. The Superstudio was a concerted effort to give form and visual clarity to the scale, scope, and pace of transformation that the Green New Deal implies.
In this short video, the organizers reflect on the Superstudio initiative and its ongoing value.
The Superstudio ran from August 1, 2020 until June 30, 2021. Participation was open to all design schools, professional practices, individuals, and other design and planning related organizations. Some 670 projects were submitted through the year-long open call, which attracted the participation of over 90 universities in 39 states and 10 countries, as well as hundreds of practitioners from across the design disciplines. These thought-provoking projects range from adaptive reuse of degraded sites to regional-scale frameworks to visualizations of speculative futures.
The full set of submissions are catalogued as part of the Green New Deal Superstudio archive in the JSTOR digital library, where they are freely accessible. A curated set of 55 projects can be viewed on the Superstudio website. These projects were selected through an extensive review process to illustrate the wide variety of issues, innovation, scales, and geographic regions represented in the submissions and to catalyze conversation.
The Superstudio also informed a national conversation on design, policy and advocacy at the April 2022 Grounding the Green New Deal Summit at the National Building Museum.
