2012 ASLA Student Awards

Analog technology that once dominated field terrain operations is currently yielding to advanced digital practices to better adapt to urbanized combat. This phenomena affects landscape at the surface level. Digital technologies allow for specific, almost surgical operations within tight urban networks, rendering the standard two-dimensional Cartesian grid obsolete. The Massachusetts Military Reservation provides a testing ground for advanced technologies, such as unmanned surface vehicles and

Historically, the San Francisco Bay was a landscape constantly in flux, influenced by wind, erosion, and water. Over the past century, the Bay edge has become more static. Yet this constructed edge was formed over time, through the deployment of a complex framework for siltation and accretion. This industrial edge is no longer economically, ecologically, or socially relevant. This project proposes a new way of engaging the Bay edge, creating a new productive landscape that incubates new hybri

The project attempts to tackle with existing environmental issues of Willet’s Point, NY, by manipulating land form with optimized drainage system and water catchment, controlling the growth of urban blocks, and introducing salt pan as novel economic and ecological catalyst along the flushing bay. The design strategy takes advantage of superior regional access and public amenity adjacencies, Willet’s Point envisions itself as a site that offers sustainable landscape infrastructure, incubates s

It is important to understand that redevelopment for any rust belt city should be conscientious of the unlimited time frame yet limited budget. Buffalo, New York was left with 180 acres of industrial wasteland along it’s outer harbor; a product of Erie Canal dredging. By utilizing existing site materials to create the foundations for an uninhibited landscape, and allowing natural systems to act upon it, the site becomes as “natural” as a man made site could ever be.

City Park, a cypress swamp turned golf course, is located in the core of Baton Rouge and adjacent to the University Lakes, Baton Rouge’s most used recreation area. Rewilding City Park builds an ecological strategy to reinvigorate native ecologies while diversifying the park’s program for a wider array of users. With economic generators and aggressive management strategies that maximize ecological health, City Park becomes a pilot for a new treatment of the University Lakes ecosystem.

Domingo Eco-Community is an residential project located in Santo Domingo in New Mexico. The design connects a strategic approach for the establishment of a community with the organic urban farming operation, cultivating agriculture and productive landscape value to serve as a community resource and economic development opportunities in a dry land. The goal is to provide an affordable housing development for a micro-moisture habitat for humanity with the harmony of relationships between cultur

This project is for the space under Yonding Bridge in Beijing.It aim at improves the residential environment and provides sheltered accommodation for petitioners.In the project using bamboo weaving structure is formed based on petitioner’s activities: When petitioners come to Beijing appealing for help, the bamboo weaving structure provides them a space for free rein and spontaneous gathering, and the asylum air pupas freely distributed in the structure become the space for thinking, writing

Vacant land, dying industry, and a declining manufacturing sector warrant a rethinking of the role of industrial corridors along the Chicago River. Although traditional industrial corridors are shrinking, the vacancies provide the opportunity to insert a new sustainable industry into the Chicago River landscape. Chicago’s Slip District emerges as an economic and ecological response. By coupling localized water based industries with a performative hydrologic landscape, Chicago will once again

Focusing on the responsive integration of landscape and urban form, this project proposes a new vision for the highly polluted and politically contested Willets Point peninsula in Queens, New York. Based on land ownership patterns and levels of contamination and flooding as determined by a phytoforensic grid of hybrid poplar trees, existing lots are dismantled and critical infrastructural systems are deployed, spawning new landscape typologies and urban organizations that are uniquely suited

The significance of this project relies on the unique culture of the Quechan Indian tribe. Looking to indigenous Indian cultural practices of food, water, and mobility can help revitalize cultures lost to the reservation system and inform wider issues of infrastructural and cultural stability. Located along the Colorado River near Yuma Arizona, this project challenges current landscape practices of agricultural water use, ecology and housing, and creates contemporary solutions based on native

Microcosm of America employs general systems theory1 to a regional planning effort for San Juan Island and San Juan Island National Historic Park in Washington State. Focusing more closely on the relationship between parts and people a process oriented plan was created. By weighting culture, ecology, and development equally this project develops a framework agenda for the parks and the community to grow as one unit resulting in a more efficient growth pattern and a richer culture and ecology.

Walk Raleigh started as a group of 27 unsanctioned signs installed at 3 different intersections around downtown Raleigh. The signs include an arrow, destination, color, QR code and text stating how many “minutes by foot” it is to walk to said destination. Since installation, WalkRaleigh received national & international attention for it’s civic engagement tactics and outcome. Raleigh’s City Council unanimously approved Walk Raleigh as a pilot education program promoting a healthy and safe

This 40-second animation reveals ideas and techniques behind new ways of landscape representation. These new landscape representation methods aim at combining advantages of modeling, drawings, photos, movies, as well as computer graphic techniques in order to better capture the essence of a site, its culture, its physical characteristic, its morphology.

A video game, app and interactive website will creatively communicate the urgency of sustainability issues and help the next generation dream of a different, biologically healthy world.

Compared to traditional data sources such as government data, crowd-sourced data provides information on identification, perception/emotion and social interaction that is currently unavailable. However, fundamentally new approaches are required to map, visualize and analyze crowd-sourced data's undiscovered patterns as well as to explore implications for professions working with people and the real environment. The goal of this research is to identify potential applications and to develop met

Sited at the Pitagoras School in Lomas de Zapallal (LdZ), an urban slum in northern Lima, the Praque Primaria Pitagoras integrates design activism, interdisciplinary research and education. Itinvolves the design and implementation of ecologically intelligent interventions in community infrastructure, related capacity building programs and the monitoring and evaluation of their environmental, economic and human health impacts.

Bayou Commons is downtown Houston’s first residential district celebrating cultural diversity and urban lifestyle. The proposed development represents a virtual collaboration by students of landscape architecture, architecture and real estate finance from two universities located 2,000 miles apart with 100% of the work completed remotely. The four-phased development integrates aspects of urban restoration ecology, cultural narratives, and demographic analysis balanced with complex urban econo