Supergraphic Landscapes

Supergraphic Landscapes explores contemporary public art and creative placemaking strategies that amplify identity, access, and belonging in public spaces. The book catalogues, analyses, and speculates on urban design methodologies that position networked strategies of graphics in the built environment.

In summer 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd and the national reckoning with systemic racism, community groups in Chicago and nationwide rallied to create large-scale, typographic street murals affirming “Black Lives Matter.” Street murals like these provide a point-of-departure and motivation for the emerging interdisciplinary design praxis that the authors describe as “Supergraphic Landscapes.” By mashing-up strategies at the intersection of architecture, graphic design, and landscape architecture, Supergraphic Landscapes explore how urban-scaled graphics and creative placemaking techniques enact more culturally-relevant public spaces and social infrastructures. Challenging the notion that public art exists to merely “decorate” the city, Supergraphic Landscapes argues that particular strategies of contemporary public art empower architects and urban designers to re-structure the city’s deep-seated organisational and operational patterns.

Joseph Altshuler is cofounder of Could Be Design, a Chicago-based architectural design practice, and Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he teaches in the School of Architecture and the Department of Landscape Architecture. His teaching, practice, and scholarship explore architecture’s capacity to build solidarity, initiate serious play, and amplify participation in civic life. Nekita Thomas is an experiential graphic designer, researcher, and Assistant Professor of Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Art & Design. Her teaching, practice, and scholarship examine discourse on racial identity and urbanism, activating design’s power to spatialise justice, cultivate radical imagining, reclaim cultural narratives, and enact community-driven design.