2023 ASLA Professional Awards

Cloud Song is an 8-acre development located in the Sonoran Desert, created to house the Indigenous Scholars Institute and Cultural Center, and Business School on the Scottsdale Community College (SCC) campus in Scottsdale, Arizona. SCC is the only public community college located on Native American land. The Indigenous Cultural Center is the realization of a longstanding commitment by the College to provide a cultural center for the Indian Community.

Grand Junction overlays strategic infrastructure with communal amenity, creating a socially-purposeful, environmentally-resilient, and inclusive park in Westfield, Indiana. Following a 500-year storm event, what was to be a 7.8-acre civic park suddenly required a stormwater infrastructure solution. To resolve the threat of flooding, Cool Creek, which bifurcates the site, required stabilization and repair of its channelized profile. The park is now once again celebrated as a verdant setting where

Phytoremediation plants take center stage to mitigate groundwater and highway-generated air pollution at Hood Bike Park, a new half-acre public park and bike commuter hub. This reimagined landscape on the former Hood Milk plant both cleanses’ pollutants and creates a catalyst for the redevelopment of industrial lands. A bike pavilion is tucked under a sloping topography to hide the elevated highway to the west. The topography raises the entire park out of the 2100 coastal flood zone and provides

Peavey Plaza stands as a new benchmark for rehabilitating historic sites. We were able to preserve the character of this 1975 project while addressing equity and accessibility issues. But only a few short years ago, its time had nearly run out. The brutalist cascading fountains had run dry a decade, and it was slated for demolition. This visionary landscape was saved from demolition by a last-minute lawsuit brought by The Cultural Landscape Foundation. We led the team through extensive communit

Guiwan Park is the first “water finger” to be built for Qianhai Water City, an innovative and sustainable new city. As the green core, Guiwan Park supports the city center and creates large-scale blue-green infrastructure for stormwater management, flood protection and habitat recovery. A continuous coastal park, Guiwan Park features 51,000 sqm of mangroves, 18,000 sqm of freshwater wetland and 255,000 sqm of parkland, naturalizing the tidal corridor and creating a harmony of beauty and ecologic

Gene Leahy Mall is the first of three parks to reopen in a 72-acre Riverfront Revitalization Project in downtown Omaha. The park program, validated through a rigorous public process, transforms an existing inaccessible space into a reimagined regional destination. The downtown core is activated into a public realm that will connect to the Missouri River for the first time in decades. A nonprofit maintains and operates the park with events that encourage social and physical health and wellness. D

The most sustainable building is the one that’s already built. This statement rings true through the repositioning efforts at the iconic Old Chicago Post Office. Leveraging the building’s vast roof area as an asset, the Meadow has become the nation’s largest private rooftop garden enabling the space to become a park unto itself. Tenants actively and passively use the space daily to connect with nature amidst an urban backdrop; weddings, conferences, and community events are hosted atop the build

In celebration of its centennial, the University of Texas El Paso commissioned a Campus Transformation Project to reimagine the car-oriented campus dominated by asphalt, sloped lawns, and clipped hedges into a universally accessible, pedestrian-oriented campus linked to its desert ecosystem. This project transformed the 11.5-acre campus into a place that fosters biodiversity and celebrates the beauty of the desert. The project introduces a network of walkways, natively planted arroyos, and green

The LEED Platinum University of Arizona Environment + Natural Resources II is a living laboratory and a centerpiece of environmental research. The project’s architectural and landscape architectural design borrows from the iconic imagery of Arizona - striking landforms of canyons and mesas, the dramatic play of light, shadow and adapted flora. The high-performance landscape demonstrates both active and passive sustainable strategies for climate mitigation and resiliency, urban wildlife and polli

Set within a landscape shaped by wind, fire, water and ice, Andesite Ridge exposes a dramatic and ecologically rich environment, challenging the notion of contemporary design in a rugged context. A modernist interpretation of mountain living melds a design ethos of simplicity, volume, and natural materials with an artful synthesis of engineering and technology to holistically address its contextual suitability. This approach, when synthesized with strategic site planning decisions, effectively d

A contemporary adaptation of working ranch lands, the 35-acre project conveys a narrative of Wyoming’s cultural and natural history, extending the legacy of place to a new generation of users. Prioritizing sustainable planning and design principles, a modern home transitions into a pastoral landscape through distilled interventions trained on maintaining visual integrity, critical wildlife corridors, and ecological restoration. Horse pastures and meadows, compacted from overuse, are now a hav

In 2010, an arts patron acquired 150 acres of former production orchards and steep woodlands east of Cleveland, Ohio. The client presented the design team with ambitions to build a home and gardens inspired by Czech Cubism, to enrich wildlife habitat, and to site a contemporary sculpture collection that one day will welcome the public. Our work, realized over a decade, located the home in a way that foregrounds the sculpture collection and introduced newly aligned drives, orchards, gardens, over

The clients had been living on a sloping two-acre site for 20 years and felt their traditional stucco home, enclosed by a tall wall, cut them off from the site and views. They approached the design team with a request to create a new energy and water-conscious home that fully utilized the land in the hills above Monterey Bay. The LA worked closely with the design team and client to create a compound of small buildings that open onto the land and combine to define a series of outdoor spaces in a

Dedicated to Sister Lillian Murphy, a local pioneer in affordable housing who discovered, through her work in public health, a direct connection between physical health, mental health and housing, this community of 152 affordable homes in San Francisco’s Mission Bay is organized around its expansive, verdant open space. The ground level music school and childcare center open onto a giant timber bamboo forest that meanders through multi-level courtyards, connecting homes and community resources t

PopCourts! is a public plaza that not only transformed a historically disinvested commercial corridor but also changed how the City of Chicago thinks about vacant space. Designed, funded and built in less than a year, the project became a case study and inspiration for the “Public Outdoor Plaza” program. The “POP” program, has pledged to fund ten more community plazas along neighborhood retail corridors in historically underinvested and primarily black and brown communities.

The St. Pete Pier is an investment in equitable open space and environmental resiliency, and a catalyst for economic development. The project replaces an aging pier with a dynamic public landscape that integrates infrastructure to energize the city’s downtown revitalization. It anchors a larger district development strategy with a multi-use approach to design, architecture, landscape architecture, programming, multi-modal access, resiliency planning and engineering. The new pier is a model for d

Developed over a decade of partnership with government, landowners, and residents, Town Branch Commons is a transformative multi-modal trail linking open space across Lexington, connecting rural and urban communities. Weaving along the path of the buried Town Branch Creek, all aspects of design are inspired by local karst geology and Bluegrass landscapes, drastically expanding the city’s tree canopy and green infrastructure while carving out space for protected bike and pedestrian lanes through

The Iona Island Wastewater Treatment Plant (IIWWTP) and Regional Park Projects collectively represent the largest capital works project ever undertaken by Metro Vancouver. Driven by the need to upgrade the existing WWTP to meet federal regulations, the projects also offer a critical opportunity to provide significant benefits to the region. In addition to WWTP upgrades, the projects will restore dynamic estuary processes, increase the island’s resilience to climate change and expand educational and recreational offerings in the regional park. These projects are a transformative opportunity to integrate urban infrastructure with ecological restoration and climate adaptation and will create a significant, ongoing legacy for the region.

The Joe Louis Greenway is a 27.5-mile planned non-motorized trail and linear park in Detroit that is reclaiming vacant industrial spaces to improve access to nature, play, and recreation for all Detroiters. The community-authored planning process-built trust through shared authorship. It celebrates the city’s unique history, culture, and neighborhood identity, provides a safe recreation experience, promotes economic development, connects neighborhoods and people, and restores the natural envi

The Master Plan for the 660-acre Greenwood Park lays out a constellation of cultural and recreational programs that connect seamlessly into a network of preserved and restored ecologies. The plan simultaneously provides community value through flood protection, improved air quality, increased habitat, and reduced maintenance demands. The process brought together over 5,000 citizens, the largest outreach in Baton Rouge’s history, to have a conversation about race and disinvestment in this histori

This project analyzed and created a conservation master plan for the restoration, adaptive management, and use of a 1600-acre patch of Longleaf Pine forest in the Sandhills ecoregion. The Sandhills are a physiographic region in the southeastern U.S. that support unique species and ecological communities, many of which are threatened or endangered. Longleaf Pine ecosystems are rated as the third most endangered ecosystem in the Southeast. The project site contains three (of four) ecological commu

Reimagine Middle Branch is a community-driven initiative to reconnect South Baltimore with a system of world-class parks, trails, programs and economic development plans along 11 miles of the Middle Branch shoreline on the Patapsco River. While the Plan outlines a visionary physical transformation of the Middle Branch, it is also meant to catalyze the intangible transformation of place for one that is equitable and inclusive. To that end, the Plan recommends a series of capital improvements alo

Building on over 50 years of grassroots planning, the Chattahoochee RiverLands is a generational vision for a 125-mile greenway, blueway, and network of open spaces reconnecting over 1 million residents with the Chattahoochee River across the Metro Atlanta Region. Developed over two years and underpinned by a tremendous engagement effort encompassing over a hundred meetings with more than 290 local groups, the vision stitches together open spaces into an uninterrupted multi-modal trail—expanding

New Orleans endures the worst urban heat island effect in the country. Despite the popular image of a city with towering Live Oaks, over half of the 72 neighborhoods in the city have less than 10% tree canopy. The New Orleans Reforestation Plan centers equity as the driving force to balance the access to the health and economic benefits of trees throughout the city. A 5-year pilot project focuses on planting trees in 5 neighborhoods while building capacity and—through a deep engagement process p

Located in the small community of Port Bay, New York, the Cobble Bell project is an annual sediment management/data collection landscape event that takes the form of a small, temporary nearshore topographic feature. As more event than a thing, it serves as an example of a landscape-led coastal management methodology that, at its foundation, is a constructed research project aimed at learning more about the coastal process affecting the community and how to better work with them in the face of

Landslide: Race and Space is a thematic digital report and exhibition about 13 threatened landscapes associated with African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native peoples. It includes an introduction detailing the historic relationship between race and space in America, an illustrated history of each site, common inequities and threats, defined as “throughlines,” and individualized calls to action. The digital exhibition also includes richly produced video interviews (2-5 minutes each) with

Nearly one million people live within one mile of the LA River. Famous for its concrete-lined channel and maligned as single-purpose infrastructure dividing communities, the river is reimagined in the LA River Master Plan Update as an integral part of daily life that addresses the interconnected needs of people, water, and the environment. Communicating and enacting this shift required innovative, multilingual, multi-generational, and hyper-local outreach to long-overlooked communities along the river.

Fifteen orihon (ori=folding, hon=book) sketchbooks from the landscape architect's Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellowship in Japan are the subject of recurring solo exhibitions, Sakura Orihon, at the US National Arboretum each spring from 2018 to the current Spring 2023 (with hiatus from global pandemic). Following the cherry blossoms from south to north, the landscape architect recorded pilgrimages to famous, venerable trees and documented horticultural practices (branch crutching, rope tenting, etc.) that embody cherry blossom culture in Japan.

To reimagine the ruins of the Historic Bruce Street School (also known as the Lithonia Negro School), the Design Team looked to the community. The Design Team stewarded this process with careful consideration by forming a community-centered and robust engagement plan that went above and beyond the typical design-focused public meeting format. The 7 public sessions accomplished the following: (1) They familiarized and re-familiarize stakeholders with the School’s history, and its physicality thro