2020 ASLA Student Awards

Dark Matter investigates organic reduction as a means of promoting biological and cultural diversity in urban cemeteries. Dissolution of the body prior to interment foregrounds the transference of matter to adjacent life; the memorials embodiment of place is expanded to include natural systems and ecological productivity. The funerary landscape is decentralized from static site of memorial to evolving memorial system that invites engagement with the living.

In the context of mass extinction, climate change and global pandemic, an environmentally ethical funeral practice fuses the loss of individual with the diffuse and existential nature of ecological loss. These layered forms of grief operate at multiple temporal scales and suggest a new typology of memorial landscape that engages natural cycles of a duration that exceeds the human life. To address these forms of grief, this funerary landscape offers biodiverse public spaces that meaningfully rejoin bodily death to broader natural cycles of ecological metamorphosis. Rituals of commemoration, management, and activism would alchemize to unexpected results when program of memorial, ecological preserve, and space for collective action merge.

524 million people practice open defecation in India. Open defecation perpetuates the vicious cycle of disease and poverty leading to child mortality, malnutrition, social inequity, and violence against women and girls. In this context, there are few spaces of conscious design intervention that provide both practical and aesthetic value. We explore how landscape architects can improve the lives of people that lack basic facilities through our design of the built environment. Our goal is everyone will have access to personal toilets in each household and public toilets in community spaces.
This project introduces sanitation facility designs and phasing in Raipur, India. We propose design solutions based on a theoretical framework highlighting causes, conditions, and effects of open defecation. Our designs can be replicated in other vulnerable communities outside of India that also suffer from poor or absent sanitation infrastructure. By working for communities that lack even basic necessities in a landscape with little consideration for the built environment, this proposal challenges our own notions of what design can do for human beings.

West Oakland has a rich history of industry, social activism, immigration, blending of cultures, and urban developments. Unfortunately, the once buzzing industrial-based district has fallen into deprivation because of the 1960s’ Transit-Oriented Development, which became a force of segregation, leading to a food desert, an unhealthy environment, and failures to provide residents with equal opportunities. Meanwhile, gentrification became a growing threat, due to the economic development of the surrounding Bay Area, which is closing in on the local West Oakland communities.

A new FOOD-ORIENTED-DEVELOPMENT strategy is proposed - to turn around the dire situation environmentally, economically, and most importantly, socially. By tackling the two major hindrances to improving growth and food conditions (in soil contamination and lack of initiatives), the new system starts at the vacant historical train station, transforming a former site of Oakland’s glory into a catalytic site for growth. The Food Oriented Development (F.O.D.) also brings West Oakland to the center of the Bay Area as a new development model, where people are reconnected by the most fundamental elements of life: food.

Eleven students set out to retrieve, document, and analyze the world’s traditional water systems. The first goal was to study how these systems functioned physically, how they operated socially, and how they organized landscapes and societies spatially. The second was to imagine new variations of these old systems and test them on the urban landscapes of water-stressed Los Angeles. The premise? By building a richer, more robust lexicon of pre-carbon drylands design systems, we might build capacity, in ourselves and others, for inspired design vision in a post-carbon world.

Jia is a story that raises awareness about the ever-evolving issues of sustainability, resource exhaustion, waste, conservation, and regeneration from the lens of a small family restaurant. It aims to teach readers that the little things that regular people do can contribute to making the environment a healthier place to live because they focus on ethical issues over personal and monetary interests.

As a webtoon, Jia is a vertical, linearly formatted cartoon designed to be read on smartphones, making it portable, accessible, and readily consumable by younger audiences all around the world. Heavily illustration and story-focused, the content is easily digestible and engages the reader through their interest in the conflict that the main character faces.

Through its story, Jia aims to let readers recognize growing issues in environmental sustainability and inspire them to take action in their own life. By combining entertainment and education, Jia's goal is to help people learn about the growing issues in Landscape Architecture in a fun, engaging way.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) we have less than 12 years before we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of planetary warming. Crossing this threshold would lock in irreversible and catastrophic changes in Earth’s oceanic and atmospheric systems. It was in response to these dire warnings that, on February 7, 2019, Senator Ed Markey and House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced House Resolution 109 (HR-109). HR-109 is a sweeping plan to become carbon-neutral by 2050, through just, green job creation and is commonly referred to as the Green New Deal.

The investments a Green New Deal would make in our physical assets—homes, offices, transportation, and parks, —are where the material benefits of a Green New Deal will be best understood by the American people. As it currently stands, the Green New Deal offers little insight into how such an ambitious program would be realized in the built and natural environment. In this studio, we ask how and where designers could play a role in pushing the Green New Deal from an idea to reality.

As China is rapidly entering into an aging society, the traditional home-based care model is facing huge challenges. There is a growing need for better designed community programs to serve the seniors and their families within the environment they live. This project Le Garden, aims at creating a healthy and comfortable outdoor space to accommodate interactive, recreational, and educational activities for seniors, to strengthen the bonds between seniors and their families, and to revitalize the social network within and outside of the community.

Throughout the project, the team highly engaged local community service providers, local residents and organizations in the design, building and management of this sustainable community space, Le Garden. The design concepts incorporated natural recuperation, low impact development, self-sustaining eco-community and the integration of nature-based education for children and day care for seniors. Le Garden is the first college-student-built community garden in the city of Hefei and in Anhui province, and has become a model for community micro-renovation in the local area.