Category Archives: Awards

The 2022 ASLA Awards Issue

Cover of October issue of LAM showing swing-like sculpture in Seattle park.
“Riverfront Spokane,” a 2022 ASLA Professional Award winner for General Design by Berger Partnership. Cover photo by Built Work Photography.

The October 2022 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine is the annual awards issue devoted to showcasing the ASLA Student and Professional Award winners, as well as the ASLA Honors recipients.

The Student Awards jury, led by Mark Hough, FASLA, reviewed 459 projects in eight categories and named just 19 award winners, including five Awards of Excellence. Dennis Otsuji, FASLA, chaired the 11-member Professional Awards jury, which reviewed 506 submissions across seven categories and awarded 28.

The efforts of the Student Award winners revealed a growing concern over the impacts of climate change and the need to solve problems with a combination of rigorous research and imaginative designs. Students are clearly looking forward to a future in which landscape interventions can make a real difference on the local and global scales.

In the Professional Awards, look for projects that focus on social justice, climate resilience, site responsiveness, and financial feasibility. The winning teams vigorously pursued community input, often in inventive ways. Jurors were impressed with approaches that asked the right questions and laid a foundation on which other landscape architects could build.

Among the ASLA Honors is the Bradford Williams Medal. LAM’s Editorial Advisory Committee selects two Bradford Williams Medal awards each year, one published in LAM and one in a mainstream publication, that demonstrate excellence in writing about landscape architecture.

For writing in LAM, the winner is “Paths Forward,” by Katharine Logan, in LAM’s August 2021 issue, on the work of reconciliation in action in Canada.

For writing in the general media, the winner is “Manufacturing Nature,” by Eric Klinenberg, The New Yorker, August 9, 2021, on the work of Kate Orff, FASLA, and SCAPE.

As landscape architecture becomes more visible to the public in this era of climate emergency, the ability of journalists to write critically about the role of design and landscape is particularly vital.

Also in this issue:

  • Now: MASS Design Group expands habitat for Rwanda’s mountain gorillas. (Online October 12)
  • Now: North Carolina’s riverfront parks must do more to stay dry.
  • Now: A bike-friendly park by Offshoots makes a big impact in a small footprint. (Online October 26)
  • Now: A new atlas will track land restoration and conservation nationwide.
  • Now: Hood Design Studio builds crows’ nests at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. (Online October 19)

A Wilder West

This article is also available in Spanish

Colwell-Shelor embraces “ugly-pretty” ecology on a Camelback Mountain estate.

By Brian Barth / Photography by Caitlin Atkinson

Stormwater runoff from the property collects in a steel basin before seeping into the lawn through a series of weeps. Photo by Marion Brenner, Affiliate ASLA.

Rare is the landscape architecture client who enjoys a view of decay out their window. Continue reading A Wilder West

Awards Focus: The Death and Life of Great American Barges

LAM is highlighting student and professional winners from the 2021 ASLA Awards by asking designers to share an outtake that tells an important part of their project’s narrative.

Student Analysis and Planning Honor Award

Weicong Huang

“The rendering shows local wetland restoration, in process and after. In the gray frame, the ship is ejecting stored sediment into the wetland and people are planting native weeds. Continue reading Awards Focus: The Death and Life of Great American Barges

In Their Elements

Stimson takes on the challenges of success by staying true to its New England roots.

By Jonathan Lerner

Stephen Stimson, FASLA, and Lauren Stimson, ASLA, built a new house and utility building on property Steve’s family has long farmed. Photo by Ngoc Doan.

Outside the kitchen door of the Massachusetts farm where Stephen (Steve) Stimson, FASLA, and his wife and partner, Lauren Stimson, ASLA, live with their two kids is a water feature created by Steve in the agrarian spirit of thrift. Continue reading In Their Elements

Paths Forward

2022 Bradford Williams Medal Winner

As Canada comes to terms with a brutal colonial legacy, two landscape architect-led plans light the way toward reconciliation.

By Katharine Logan

The plan proposes a range of site infrastructure and interpretation, including a downloadable app with narration by Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in elders. Hemis/Alamy stock photo.

Across the Yukon River from Dawson City, up around 64 degrees latitude, the Top of the World Highway wends its way over 65 miles of unglaciated landscape to the border with Alaska. Continue reading Paths Forward

The Emergent Epitaph

An ASLA Student Award-winning project challenges outdated death practices.

By Zach Mortice

John Whitaker’s Dark Matter project posits a memorial landscape that is a forum for collective action and protest. Image courtesy John Whitaker, Student ASLA.

One of the most startling projects submitted for the 2020 ASLA Student Awards was Dark Matter—a proposal that uses landscape as a transmission medium for the ecological values of the deceased. Continue reading The Emergent Epitaph