Landscape Architecture Magazine

Margie Ruddick is the recipient of the 2013 National Design Award in landscape architecture given by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Ruddick, whose namesake firm is based in Philadelphia, has become known for big urban and ecological projects such as Queens Plaza in New York (with WRT), the Shillim Institute and Retreat in Maharashtra, India, and the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China. The installation of Ruddick’s Urban Garden Room in the Bank of America building in Manhattan can be seen in the time-lapse video below. The project was a collaboration with her mother, Dorothy Ruddick, who died in 2010. (A gallery of Ruddick’s projects can be found here.)

Closer to home, a couple of years ago, Ruddick’s neighbors in Philadelphia thought she was a farmer of noxious weeds. As a hilarious story by Anne Raver reports, Ruddick received a summons from the city and went to court to tell a judge that she knew exactly what she was doing. The judge tossed the summons.

For lifetime achievement, the Cooper-Hewitt is honoring the great James Wines. Wines founded his multidisciplinary studio, SITE, in New York in 1970, and was far ahead of most architects and designers in pushing the importance of the environment and the landscape. Some of you may remember Wines’s apocalyptic designs for the Best retail chain. If you’ve ever been to the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park in New York, that’s his design, too. But there is much, much more.

James Wines

A BEST retail store by SITE.

The architect and critic Michael Sorkin is receiving a National Design Award for “Design Mind,” which few followers of his agitations over the years will question. Studio Gang Architects in Chicago wins the award for architecture; Aidlin Darling Design is the winner for interior design; and Paula Scher, of Pentagram, wins for communication design. The full list of winners can be found here.

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Forms + Surfaces became our first Advertising Hall of Fame inductee.

Each year at ASLA’s Annual Meeting and EXPO, I have the pleasure of presenting the Landscape Architecture Magazine Advertising Awards, aka the Lammys, organized by our publisher, Ann Looper, Honorary ASLA. These awards began in 2008 to recognize excellence in graphics, messages, and persuasiveness among our advertisers. The winners are selected by a jury of landscape architects who specify products frequently and would be part of the advertisers’ likely target audience–the jury members represent various parts of the country and types of practices. This year, the jury members were Lewis E. Aqüi, ASLA, of Bell + Aqui Landscape Architecture in Miami; John S. Loomis, ASLA, of SWA Group in Sausalito, California; Jennifer Brooks, ASLA, of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects in New York City; Keith P. LeBlanc, FASLA, of Keith LeBlanc Landscape Architecture in Boston; Emmeline E. Morris, ASLA, of the Jaeger Company in Athens, Georgia; and Mario Nievera, ASLA, of Nievera Williams Design, Inc., in Palm Beach, Florida.

It’s a big job! The jury reviewed more than 300 ads that ran a full page or larger in LAM since October 2011. In each category, they pick three winners. The winners for Best Graphic Quality were FermobUSA, Acker-Stone, and Landscape Forms. The winners for Best Message were FLEX-Drain, Diamond Spas, and Ironsmith. The winners for Most Persuasive Ad were Spohn Ranch, Situ Urban Elements, and Zinco USA.

Two special awards were also given. The Advertisement of the Year Award goes to the ad that ranked highest in all three categories: Maglin Site Furniture took home that award.

And this year, a new honor, the Advertising Hall of Fame, debuted to recognize advertisers whose ads consistently excel year to year. Our first Hall of Fame inductee is Forms + Surfaces.

To view all the winning entries, click here. Congratulations to all the winners! And a special thanks to our jury for their time and effort in making another great round of awards possible.

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For the first time ever, the Urban Land Institute will award its highest honor to a landscape architect. Peter Walker, FASLA, founding partner of PWP Landscape Architecture, will receive the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development at the institute’s conference this week in Denver.

The award, chosen by a jury of developers and architects, recognizes Walker’s influence as both a designer and an educator. Walker led the landscape architecture departments at both Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, and founded some of the profession’s most successful firms. He was a chief designer for the National September 11 Memorial in New York and designed the famous Tanner Fountain at Harvard.

“For ULI, choosing Peter Walker makes a statement about the importance of landscape architecture to the built environment, and especially the necessity of providing sustainable systems, both built and natural,” said the jury’s chairman, John Bucksbaum, in a statement prepared by ULI. “His work is completely representative of what the Nichols Prize stands for—a lifelong dedication to building places that will be shared and cherished for generations.”

Past winners of the Nichols Prize include Peter Calthorpe, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard M. Daley, and His Highness the Aga Khan.

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In late September, while American landscape architects gathered for the ASLA’s Annual Meeting and EXPO in Phoenix, their European counterparts were meeting in Barcelona for the seventh European Landscape Biennial. The Biennial began in 1998 around the award of the Rosa Barba Prize, which is given for exceptional works in landscape architecture accomplished over the previous five years; seven finalists presented their projects to the gathering before the awarding of the prize.

The winner this year was EMF Landscape Architecture and Ardevols Associates Consultants for the Tudela-Culip (Club Med) Restoration Project in Cap de Creus, near Cadaqués, in Catalonia, Spain (also a General Design winner in this year’s ASLA Professional Awards). The design involved the demolition and recycling of the existing Club Med, the removal of invasive exotic plants, and the adding of hiking trails and interpretive elements to highlight the distinctive geology of the area that inspired the artist Salvador Dali.

The conference itself was often somber, which reflected Europe’s current economic headwinds. There is also impatience among European landscape architects to gain recognition and licensure for the profession, which American practitioners surely (more…)

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