2021 ASLA Professional Awards

The Natural History Museum of Utah provides an introduction to a remarkable landscape, and celebrates unique paleontological discoveries, unusual gems and minerals, preserved prehistoric artifacts, and stories told by contemporary native people. Bridging of divide of nature and culture, the Museum offers an abstract extension and transformation of the land: its campus an expression of a landscape defined by rock, minerals, and vegetation.

Prompted by increased collections and research initiatives, the museum embarked upon a campaign to build a landmark of contemporary architecture, land stewardship, and exhibit communication that would resonate with 21st-century visitors. In collaboration with the architect, the Landscape Architect designed a campus that embodies the museum’s mission to highlight the natural world through scientific inquiry, educational outreach, multi-cultural experience, and human engagement. Digital terrain modeling, utilized to make the steep terrain accessible for all users, blurs the line between intervention and conservation. Sustainable design elements including rainwater recapture, permeable surfaces, and native plantings resulted in a landscape that mimics and restores the natural conditions of the environment and the site.

Soaring 100 feet above the shoreline of Austin’s Lady Bird Lake, 70 Rainey redefines multifamily urban living in a city experiencing rapidly changing technology, culture and innovation. Its Sky Garden, a verdant refuge devoted to recreation, leisure and contemplation, is defined by the diverse and native ecologies of the Texas Hill Country that weave together a sensorial outdoor living experience.

Sustainability, a priority from the outset, led to early microclimate testing, the inclusion of locally sourced pollinator species, and abundant absorbent surfaces that manage stormwater runoff from entering the critical watershed. A complex planting palette, comprised of more than 70 native species, provides an ever-changing and abundant display of regional flora along meandering paths, within secluded nooks, and, most transformational, upon vertical architectural facades. Multidisciplinary collaboration informed design decisions to ensure habitable spaces were tempered from the region’s intense sunlight and high-speed winds.

As cities around the world continue to expand, evolve and respond to climatic change, The Sky Garden at 70 Rainey sets a precedent for creatively and sustainably growing up rather than out.

In the 1990s, when Interstate 105 was constructed, it cut directly through the City of Lynwood along with several other majority Black and Hispanic communities. Lynwood is only now beginning to recover from the devastating impacts of this reconfiguration, which have been exacerbated by decreased property values, business closures, and “white flight.” Today, the neighborhoods in the shadow of the freeway corridor remain underserved by many basic needs and amenities, including access to safe and equitable outdoor spaces.

In 2014, the design team partnered with the City of Lynwood to transform a derelict freeway-adjacent right of way into a 5.25-acre, five-block linear park. The park supports an abundance of recreational amenities and gathering spaces for the approximately 26,000 people who live within a half-mile walking distance. The park’s programming focuses on exercise, education, and play, while its bold, gestural design reinforces the neighborhood’s unique vitality. Today, the park serves to reconnect the City of Lynwood across the freeway, begin to repair the brutal history of discriminatory development, and celebrate a growing community’s vibrant future.

The Visualizing Equity in Landscape Architecture (VELA) Project is a research initiative that reveals, spatializes, and acknowledges the status of gender equity throughout landscape architecture. Over twenty years have passed since the last report documenting women's careers in landscape architecture. The issues raised then are similar to many problems women face now. To understand why these disparities still exist and the gaps associated with them, the VELA project offers a current review of women's status in both academia and the profession. The research collected over 17,000 unique data points from multiple public sources. The analysis organizes the data into a series of robust visualizations that catalog current trends and highlight opportunities to improve gender equity in the profession. The purpose of this research is a question of value—to recognize where "we" as a profession fall short and where critical re-alignments must occur. The project is a provocative and timely exploration that serves to inform, instigate, and empower the landscape architecture community to rally together and transform the future of practice, now!

In the volume Black Landscapes Matter (UVA Press, 2020), editors Walter Hood and Grace Mitchell Tada bring together landscape architecture and planning professionals to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. The authors examine diverse places across the US and assert these landscapes as canvases that shape individual and communal identities. Through critique, celebration, and examination, they call for the recognition of these places as paramount for enabling a comprehensive reading of the American landscape. Over 1,000 copies of the book have already been sold, and the volume is currently in its third reprinting. The success of the book speaks to the demand within the built environment professions, and specifically landscape architecture, to address issues of race, equity, and truthful cultural memory. Black Landscapes Matter serves as a starting point for conversations in communities across the US working toward equitable and just public spaces, and

The Portland Open Space Sequence is a quartet of interactive fountains, plazas, and connecting pathways designed between 1963 and 1971 on native land home to Multnomah, Cowlitz, Clackamas, and Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde. These mid-century modern civic assets are internationally celebrated and stand as Portland’s most influential works of landscape architecture.

Designed to foster civic joy, the Sequence emerged from brutal beginnings, a redevelopment that erased an ethnic enclave and one of Portland’s oldest neighborhoods, South Portland. With bold artistry and magnetic, exuberant public spaces not seen since the Renaissance, the Sequence defies the conventions of American urbanism and mid-century modernism. Their design and construction changed the history of American urban space, pioneering a path from passive parks and squares to a more dynamic, participatory merging of nature, art, and social experiment. A source of community pride, the Sequence, has become the soul of the downtown, iconic Fountain District landmark, a symbol of the Pacific Northwest naturalism, and ‘people place’ for generations to enjoy.