Badlands National Park: Cedar Pass Developed Area Design Guidelines & Centennial Studio

The Cedar Pass Developed Area is the primary visitor contact center within Badlands National Park, developed during the early- to mid-twentieth century, following a trend of early tourism in South Dakota, as part of New Deal-era infrastructure improvements and the Mission 66 program of the National Park Service. In 2005, Cedar Pass was identified as a cultural landscape and made eligible for listing as a district on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today, much of the Cedar Pass development reflects decisions made during the New Deal era when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) constructed infrastructure for the National Monument. Though many of the earlier buildings did not survive, planning at Cedar Pass still follows the tenets of 1930s planning principles. Mission 66 design and planning efforts in the 1950s and 1960s built on this earlier work and helped to establish the site’s contemporary landscape character.

In Fall 2015, thirteen historic preservation, architecture, landscape architecture, and planning students participated in a course exploring the Cedar Pass Developed Area in Badlands National Park. Students began their semester with a 10-day site visit where they met with park and regional office staff and gathered information needed to sustain the project throughout the semester.

The culmination of their work included a Design Guidelines Document, among other things.  Used as a planning and management tool, this Design Guidelines Document illustrates the character-defining features of a historic building and landscape, indicating the desired future conditions and the preferred approach for treatments and maintenance cycles.