Landscape Architecture Magazine

STUDENT COMMUNICATIONS: 652 to You: An Approach for a Collective Voice

In the September issue of LAM, the 2020 Awards lineup unfurls.

At the end of March, just a few weeks into the nationwide shutdown orders, both the coronavirus and the now-ubiquitous Zoom meeting were novel. But the jury for the 2020 ASLA Professional Awards, made up of landscape architects across various levels of practice, accepted, if not embraced, a new means for judging these 38 winning projects. Under these conditions, the jury assessed the merits of shared space from a fresh perspective. Projects that facilitated equal access to the outdoors, enhanced how people naturally behave in those spaces, and established meaningful connections with one another—and with the land—assumed a different weight in these times.

The ASLA Student Awards jury met this year under a different moon, several months later. The pandemic had blown up the spring semester, fracturing student focus and cutting short many research projects. Yet despite these disruptions, the jury found its center quickly. Clarity and community were the twin threads that entwined the comments over several days. As one juror remarked, “We should be leaning in” on anything that engages community.

Among the Professional Award winners, five projects received an Award of Excellence, including Philadelphia’s particularly noteworthy reinvention of Dilworth Park in the Urban Design category.  In General Design, Walker Macy’s Portland Japanese Garden expansion evoked traditional Japanese techniques with contemporary materials, and, the jury noted, “instead of simply adopting a preservation strategy,” employed “stonemasons with a long lineage [to] produce the garden’s castle-like walls using local granite.” In Residential Design, the jury awarded a well-documented restoration and redesign of the grounds of an English estate originally created by the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll in which “new interventions keeping with the historic style extend the site choreography farther afield.”  And in Rwanda, sub-Saharan Africa’s most densely populated country, the Award of Excellence winner in the Analysis and Planning category conceptualized a master plan that tackles universal convictions: climate change, resilience, sustainability, social equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Student Awards were handed out to a range of projects, but the jury highlighted the importance of communication across all the category discussions. Clarity, concision, and the ability to get across the steps from A to B in winning projects was often mentioned as a factor that made the difference in otherwise worthy projects. But the jury also considered the ways the projects might communicate outward, to the broader world, about what landscape architecture is and how it might want to be seen. In order to draw in the next generation of designers, the jury asked if “what they are putting out there” as examples of student work might be understood by the next generation.

Throughout the month of September we’ll be celebrating and highlighting projects from the 2020 Professional and Student Awards, including interviews with the teams behind the winners. The complete list of student and professional award winners is available on the ASLA website.

The digital edition of the September LAM is FREE, and you can access it here and share it with your clients, colleagues, and friends. You can also buy this issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine at more than 250 bookstores, including many university stores and independents, as well as at Barnes & Noble. Single digital issues are available for only $5.25 at Zinio or you can order single copies of the print issue from ASLA. Annual subscriptions for LAM are a thrifty $59 for print and $44.25 for digital. Our subscription page has more information on subscription options.

Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag) for more updates on #ASLAawards and the September issue.

Image Credits: Dilworth Park, James Ewing/Otto; Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA), MASS Design Group; Portland Japanese Garden, Stephen Tamiesie; Marshcourt, James Ogilvy; Designing a Green New Deal, University of Pennsylvania; 652 to You: An Approach for a Collective Voice, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Resilience Through Regeneration, Texas A&M University.