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What are your design principles? What is your formula for success? What are the most challenging obstacles for the profession? topos had the opportunity to talk to Michael Van Valkenburgh, founder and partner of one of the US’s leading landscape architecture firms Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc (MVVA) and to Scott Streeb, Associate Principal at MVVA and a key member of the creative team. Michael’s lifelong dedication to the medium of landscape and its robust material expression is evident in MVVA’s diverse body of work, including gardens, museums, parks of all sizes, campuses, and urban design. Scott’s interest lies in creating inclusive spaces that children of all ages, cultures and personality types can find comfort in while also encouraging caretaker interaction.

Mastermind: Michael Van Valkenburgh

Who and what has most influenced you?
I have been practicing landscape architecture for close to 50 years, and during that time I have found inspiration in both expected and unexpected places. Going back to the beginning – at least, to the summer after I graduated from Cornell, in 1973 – I drove across the United States, visiting projects I admired by the offices of Dan Kiley and Lawrence Halprin.
Two projects that still stand out to me are Kiley’s Miller Garden in Columbus, Indiana and Halprin’s Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco, which includes the exuberant Vaillancourt Fountain. When I think of the Miller Garden, I still can feel the grace in the many geometric transitions and the overall sense of comfort from the openness of the spaces and the dense plantings that weave around them. I love the way Kiley pushed the weeping beeches up against the side of the house, and how that choice plays their excessiveness against the rhythm of the elegant honey locust allée nearby. Halprin’s work in San Francisco made me smile and seemed to bring out the playfulness in people.
I met Kiley that summer and occasionally spent time with him over the years. His stubbornness and tendency to obfuscate could be turn-offs, but part of me respected how strong-minded he could be. In the 1980s, I drove to Vermont to see him, passing apple orchards threading up through mountains and valleys along the way. I asked him how he felt when trees went missing from his bosquets, as I had seen in many of the gridded apple orchards. His answer was so good: “When trees die, that is when the bosquet starts to get really good.” In my final months at Cornell, I came to know Halprin as well. At the end of my last semester, I drove him to the airport, and he said: “I really like your work; come join my firm in the fall.” However, when I visited his office in San Francisco, which had a mandatory silence policy until lunchtime (so I couldn’t talk to anyone), Halprin told me he wasn’t hiring. We chatted for a while, and I asked him about the wonderful plantings Mai Arbegast had done for several of his plazas and parks. He got irritated and said that he designed everything that came out of his office. His unwillingness to say anything positive about the enormous contributions of Mai Arbegast and Angela Danadjieva to his many great landscapes left me cold. After my turn-off visit with Halprin, I decided to head back East, but the long way, with a northern detour up the West Coast to Seattle to see Rich Haag’s Gas Works Park, which was still in progress and would be completed two years later. The landscape was deeply appealing, just like Rich himself. He had his moments of inscrutability, but he spoke with the infectious enthusiasm of a leprechaun and understood that landscapes are so appealing in part because there is no singular way to see, feel, or know them. Many years later, after curating an exhibit of Rich’s work at Harvard, I got to know him much better. He had a wicked sense of humor, an inquisitive mind, and a generosity about the purpose of parks. He also loved people and realized that everything he did depended on a team. I spent a month just before that trip as a junior fellow living at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Every day I walked through Beatrix Farrand’s quite exceptional gardens there. Farrand was new to me and I puzzled over the collage of elements she created lying over the strongly sloping topography. This approach departed from what I heard over and over at Cornell: organize a project around a single “big idea.” It seems brilliant to me now – and quite relevant to how our office makes parks: to meet the needs of diverse user groups, provide many distinct landscape experiences within a large collaged whole.

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Why did you become a landscape architect?
For me the question really is, when did you discover that you were a landscape architect. That happened when, as a college freshman expecting to major in history, I read Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature. My antennae went up. I loved the thought of spending my life absorbed in the kinds of questions McHarg was asking. A month later, I applied to the landscape architecture program at Cornell, and I have never looked back.

What are your design principles?
When all is said and done, my work is about plants. I tend to see the best landscapes as assemblages of different program areas shaped by unique vegetation.

What is your formula for success?
I always start a project by seeing it as an opportunity to explore. Designing a landscape isn’t like looking up a recipe in a cookbook, buying the ingredients, and then following each step as written. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I start by taking stock of all the available ingredients and then begin thinking about things I can do with them.

What are the most challenging obstacles for the profession?
I am a bit troubled by the popular attitude right now that landscape architecture can save the world. It is not because I don’t want to save the world. What I can do is make the world better an acre or a square mile at a time and to me that’s a big contribution. It is going to take a global commitment to save the planet.

Talent: Scott Streeb

Who and what has influenced you?
Mother nature is certainly the best landscape architect and my greatest influence. I grew up among the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Exploring these monumental and sometimes severe landforms influenced my spatial and material instincts. It taught me to read landscapes as three dimensional and sculptural. Visceral experiences of being in nature continue to be the most significant driver of my design work.

Who and what has inspired you in your professional life so far?
People who use the parks we design are the greatest inspiration. We intend to create spaces that inspire feelings: joy, connection to our fellow humans, awe, peacefulness, and even sorrow. Being a “fly on the wall” walking through an MVVA park and seeing all the social interactions is a huge inspiration and something we talk about frequently during design conversations. Play spaces are my favorite environments to design, so I am particularly inspired by watching children interact in our parks.

Why landscape architecture?
I never did too well in traditional school subjects, and art class was always my favorite. My mother was an art teacher and facilitated a creative environment. My father was a carpenter, and I learned the value of composing materials in a useful way. When I was in high school, I aspired to become a production potter, however, my parents had concerns with that as a career choice and encouraged me to pursue a degree at Colorado State University. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, until I stumbled into the studios of the landscape architecture department with physical models and drawings plastered all over the walls. I immediately knew this the perfect fit because it was a mixture of creativity and working with nature.

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What are your design principles?
My design principles are that I try not to have design principles. I try and empty my mind and draw inspiration from the site itself, what it was, what it is and who is the intended user.

What is your special focus?
Understanding the psychosocial stages of development from infancy to maturity helps prove that we all need play in our lives. My special focus is to create whimsical, fantastical, and playful spaces. Additionally, I specialize in the sculptural aspects of landform.

What is your formula for success?
Trusting my gut when inspiration strikes and finding a way to articulate it has been a successful strategy for me. Often, my first ideas are fleeting and happen either late at night or early in the morning. The first step in my process is to solidify them as quickly as possible so that they are not lost. This requires seizing the time to capture them, often at unexpected maybe even inconvenient moments. Next, I allow the idea to develop in my mind a bit before inviting feedback from others. Once the open forum of design begins in our project teams, impassioned discourse and debate and dogged iteration bring our work to its final form.

What are the most challenging obstacles in the profession?
Advancements in technology and software have allowed the profession to become more efficient and collaborative and it is amazing and exciting. However, as a designer who learned to integrate digital tools into a strong analog foundation, I know we owe it to young designers to preserve the handcrafted aspects of our work. The fundamentals of hand grading and modeling instill nuance and apt sense of scale in designers that software cannot teach. We need to preserve the tactile traits of our profession.

What is the most important role landscape architecture has to play in the future?
To continue making beautiful spaces that people enjoy and that act as egalitarian melting pots for cities.

//

Read the Talent & Mastermind story of Denise Scott Brown and Dan McCoubrey as well as Seth Cohen from VSBA here. The Talent & Mastermind Story of MVVA is published in topos 115 “Right to the City”.

Poço Azul is a pocket community of about 500 people within the metropolis of Maceió, Brazil. The small local river, that flows into the Atlantic Ocean, suffers from a range of pollutants, which is why Sam E. Valentine, a candidate in the Master in Landscape Architecture program at Harvard Graduate School of Design, decided to orient his final studio course around the topic of the river and the question of what the profession of landscape architecture might be able to offer towards improving the lives of residents and quality of water. His research threaded him through centuries of indigenous heritage, industrial development, catastrophic flooding, and both environmental and physical violence.

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Maybe it overshot the runway. As I walked the narrow cobblestone street of this low-lying village in northeastern Brazil, the glint of a glass windshield caught my eye, revealing a decrepit tangle of cockpit, wings, and propellers perched on an overgrown bluff above the community’s rooftops. Comunidade Poço Azul is a pocket community of about 500 people within the metropolis of Maceió, Brazil, which approaches a million. Back before the coronavirus pandemic, during my first semester in the Master in Landscape Architecture program at Harvard Graduate School of Design, I squeezed in attending a presentation that was given by a visiting lecturer. Ana Rosa Chagas Cavalcanti, an architect and urban planner, presented her studies of self-construction and communal space and shared the social observations and architectural interventions that she undertook in several communities in her hometown of Maceió.

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Fast forward a year and I find myself temporarily living in none other than the city of Maceió, drawn here not by its renowned beaches or year-round warmth but by the challenges of scarcity and sanitation that define life for so many. A large portion of the city’s residents live in self-built communities that are neither authorized nor accommodated for by the municipal government. Along with a growing portion of human beings across the so-called “Global South,” these residents must battle for access to education, healthcare, sanitation infrastructure, and even legally recognized addresses.

A Riacho Runs Through It

Upon my first visit to Maceió, I was astonished to see the Riacho Reginaldo (also referred to as Riacho Salgadinho). Despite the alleés and strokes of beautification flanking it, the Riacho — a Portuguese term meaning “large stream” or “small river” — is visibly choked with floating trash and raw sewage as it flows into the Atlantic Ocean. To put this politely, if you are within a block of the Riacho, eyes shut, you can vividly imagine the waste in graphic detail. I decided to orient my final studio course around the topic of the Riacho and the question of what our profession of landscape architecture might be able to offer towards improving the condition of this pungent, disease-bearing linear element of urban blight.

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My studio research threaded me through centuries of indigenous heritage, industrial development, catastrophic flooding, and both environmental and physical violence. Once offering a source for fresh drinking water and hydraulic power, as well as navigable land routes to the city’s “highland of plateaus”, the Riacho served as the organizational backbone for the development of Maceió from the seventeenth century to the present. After understanding the lineage of failed engineering projects and political scandals, and finally realizing that the Riacho is polluted by hundreds of thousands of individual point sources along its fifteen-kilometer (nine-mile) run, I questioned my project selection altogether. In the self-constructed communities that dominate the river valley, each toilet, sink, and floor drain are plumbing lines lead into the Riacho.

Our studio instructor, Sierra Bainbridge of MASS Design Group, built the course around the concept of “community partnerships,” and in my quest to find a local organization with interest and/or capacity to create change along the Riacho, I reached out to Cavalcanti. She connected me to Projeto Azul, based in a valley far upstream, and warned me that though the community was near the headwaters of the entire Riacho, that natural wellspring had been destroyed by anthropogenic change decades ago. Communicating with Projeto Azul through the all-to-familiar combination of Instagram, Zoom, and WhatsApp, we set up my first in-person visit to their neighborhood: Comunidade Poço Azul.

Welcome to the Neighborhood

There are so many words used for the urban conditions seen in the community of Poço Azul, it is hard to know what to say. The denigrating term “slum” is still used by the United Nations. The milder label “informal settlement” is withering in the face of criticism. The key issue is that there are no responsible planning institutions in place. Even the word “favela,” which was popularized through cinematic imagery of Brazil’s urban mountainsides, does not apply here. Locals refer to these valley-nestled communities as grotas. As I am learning, Brazilians have a varied palette of terms — aglomerado subnormal, palafita, periferia, invasão — for their communities of scarcity, names that vary both in their topo-geographic descriptions and their viciousness.

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With Projeto Azul founders Artur, Duda, Evandro, and Fernanda leading me through their community, its history unfolded. By residents of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods of Maceió, grotas are considered to be temporary settlements for newly arrived migrants still seeking stable work and, eventually, formal housing. Yet the team facilitated several sidewalk conversations that allowed me to hear from residents who had been dwelling in the valley for twenty, thirty, and even forty years.

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Over the decades, the handful of isolated homes had grown to a community of hundreds. Today Poço Azul’s homes tidily front upon two streets, which trace ancient streambeds to join in a T-intersection between three surrounding plateaus. Fleeting views reveal that those who live on the plateaus have a very different lifestyle from those in the gullies: the plateau residents live thirty vertical meters (one-hundred feet) above in the affluent neighborhoods of Antares, Aldebaran, and Jardim Petrópolis. They enjoy gated streets, freestanding homes with spacious green lawns, and in-ground backyard swimming pools.

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Walking for hours with the team let me understand their organizational goals as well. The twenty- and thirty-somethings spent their childhood in Poço Azul, and after finding education outside the community, they have returned with goals to establish education, health, and recreation programs for the next generations. They also led me to important clues about the community’s material culture. We came upon several homes in various stages of construction by “Zé Maconha,” the community’s unorthodox informal contractor. We also came up against the “Muro de Berlim,” an unfriendly brick wall with reinforced concrete posts, named satirically for its Cold War cousin. The members explained that this wall was erected in recent years by an adjacent landholder to prevent the continued expansion of the community onto his parcels. Twist ending: the wall showed evidence of partial disassembly, with brick and concrete units repurposed to enable further self-construction of dwellings.

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The famed source of Riacho Reginaldo is a poço, or natural well, that was buried by sedimentation likely due to deforested hillsides. Curiously, a small creek still flows over the grave of the poço for which this community was named. Following this creek to the upland edge of the community revealed something disheartening. Reaching a point in the creek where no community homes remained upstream, it was still thickly polluted. Artur pushed into a recently disturbed hillside forest to find an outlet pipe he had never seen before roaring with fetid sludge. The epitome of environmental injustice, this polluted pipe clearly leads from the upper elevation (and upper-class) neighborhood of Aldebaran, and it was surging with untreated sewage when rain had not fallen in days.

What Landscape Architecture Can Offer

The hydrologic and material findings from my fieldwork quickly framed my studio project. Rather than absurdly trying to remedy the entire Riacho, I narrowed my focus to one headwater community. Across several desk (Zoom) reviews, guest critics Tim Duggan from the landscape architecture and urban planning firm Phronesis and Chris Kroner from MASS Design group encouraged me to maintain operations on dual scales: to think of a replicable test case for the entire Riacho but also to focus on a feasible project meaningfully tailored to the specific needs of Projeto Azul.

I began to envision a system of public-realm, communal landscape spaces that would graft upon a skeleton of new stormwater infrastructure. I developed three approaches, independently viable but complementary, to improve the lives of residents and quality of water as it leaves the community.

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The first approach, a “Preservation Band,” is a rudimentary level spreader, borrowed from civil engineering to disperse the volume of filthy water from the Aldebaran pipe over a large uninhabited landscape surface. The structure may only need to be 150 meters (500 feet) in length, but a clear run exists that would allow the Band to be elongated along the same datum if the Aldebaran outlet flow increases. The Preservation Band, essentially a low retaining wall, has the added potential to delimit community expansion, and the downslope landscape will benefit from increased soil moisture, encouraging revegetation of the slope.

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Secondly, an easily constructed “Split Runnel” will allow retrofitting to separate each dwelling’s roof runoff from its sanitary sewer outflows. Built from tijolos, the ubiquitous, lightweight terracotta bricks that define both informal and formal developments of Brazil, the Runnel can be constructed in pieces that can be connected and improved over time. The value of the Split Runnel lies in its flexible constructability and legibility: relatively clean stormwater is directed into an open, grassy trench that leads to the creekbed, while the enclosed and membrane-lined sanitary trench leads to a sump or biofiltration lagoon.

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The Biofiltration Lagoons are the third mitigation approach of my studio project. By intercepting the outflow of the combined sewer currently running from beneath the street directly into the creek, a new pipe can deliver this untreated sewage to a series of new tiered Lagoons. Careful grading maximizes storage volumes while preserving flat open space for community gatherings. The entire system is gravity-run, with no pumps required to keep it operational. The open space can be used for passive recreation, but through my studio work I test-fit several organized events. In the case of an arts festival, for example, the Lagoon wall doubles as perimeter seating and the lawn accommodates picnics, small group games, and an arts and crafts market.

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To be sure, many of these designs seem lofty, considering Projeto Azul is having challenges in securing funding to rent their community space or furnish it with tables and chairs. In the design workshop held on our second meeting I brought more than just stormwater concepts, also preparing exercises to help them advance their organization goals and reach consensus on what types of interior and exterior spaces they are working to create. One of the direct benefits I have been able to provide is a set of floorplan schemes that respond to those stated spatial desires and help make the architectural changes — study rooms, a library wall, and a teaching kitchen – real and quantifiable.

Projeto Azul, like the community that it is working to strengthen, has numerous gaps between what it wants to accomplish and where it currently stands. But I am learning that Poço Azul and communities around the globe like it are best defined by their assets not their inadequacies. The community may be called “grota” in Portuguese, but in English the best descriptor that comes to mind is “village.” Children play in the streets, chaperoned by neighbors. Residents do not merely know one another’s names but also the names of their cousins. Despite the stigma of crime in self-built communities, one resident bragged to me that nobody bothers to lock their doors at night.

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Back to the beginning, the precarious aircraft. Towards the end of our first walk, Evandro saw me photographing the plane and asked if I wanted to go see it. Taking me to the back patio of what turned out to be his family home, I gazed up a series of stairs, ladders, and ledges that mitigated the bluff. Evandro and his son led me up the plane, which up close revealed itself to be an architectural folly made entirely of building scraps.

Inspired by planes that fly over the neighborhood from a runway on one of the overlooking plateaus, Evandro explained that the back of the cockpit harbors the family’s chickens, the sheltered space beneath is his father’s homemade atelier, and the cockpit is where his father hangs out. The cockpit has seats, an assemblage console, and a working radio and headset, but the most memorable element for me was the view: a peaceful elevated vista over the rooftops of Comunidade Poço Azul.

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Sam E. Valentine is a candidate in the Master in Landscape Architecture program at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where his research focuses on the communal spaces of marginalized urban communities. Prior to his current studies, he practiced with Richard Burck Associates in Somerville, Massachusetts for nearly a decade. His built work includes downtown streetscapes, waterfront parklands, and campus landscapes throughout the United States. After earning his Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Georgia, his first job placed him at a desk in Olmsted’s old bedroom with Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Daniel Roehr, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture of the University of British Columbia, remembers his last years‘ pre-Christmas conversation with landscape architect great Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. Over Lebkuchen (gingerbread) they talked about career starting points, inspiration, design principles and the role of landscape architecture in tackling climate change.

It’s almost a year ago when I met Cornelia Hahn Oberlander during our traditional German Christmas tea with “Nürnberger Lebkuchen”, which we enjoy once a year at Point Grey in Vancouver where she lives. It happened after the news was announced that a prize equivalent to the architects Pritzker Prize will be created in her name and be awarded every two years starting in 2021 to a deserving landscape architect word wide. This prize has a value of 100.000 USD and will be the highest award the international community of landscape architects can bestow upon a person. There is no doubt, that there is no better landscape architecture visionary than Cornelia Hahn Oberlander deserving this honour. Cornelia has been awarded most, if not all, international prizes, awards, honoree doctorates available including the highest category, The Companions of the Order of Canada for the work she did for the field of landscape architecture throughout her career, spanning more than 70 years of practice. She is a pioneer, visionary and passionate about the field of landscape architecture and is still practicing, lecturing and turned 99 in 2020.

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“She is a pioneer, visionary and passionate about the field of landscape architecture and is still practicing, lecturing and turned 99 in 2020.”

The place where she lives, Point Grey in Vancouver, is near The University of British Columbia where I also teach as a professor since 2006, and where she holds an honorary professorship, and where she has been a lifelong supporter of our students and faculty.

Visiting her home always reminds me of a floating slender rectangular two-story wooden box like structure, with more large glazed panels from floor to ceiling then solid walls, and opening up to the surrounding nature. A ravine with a stream runs below her house, experienced in full, once one passes through the entrance door. Everything inside floats, the stairs, the walkway on the second floor, the walls and ceilings. The horizontal elements open up to the sky, welcoming the light in, while the vertical elements guide the views to the garden she designed, and also to spectacular views of nature surrounding the property and small peaks on islands rising above the distant Pacific Ocean.

“Her home is an architectural gem, a building which respects the landscape.”

It is an architectural gem, a building which respects the landscape, floating above, barely touching the ground only with small stilts, creating an atmosphere like a child’s small footsteps walking through a precious planted forest floor. And the buildings front garden is a sensitive ‘Cornelia graded’ undulating landscape which respects the buildings location and its natural context, protecting the existing trees and the grading. This is the way Cornelia always designs with respect to and for nature, be it a garden, a green roof, a park or a public square.

“Landscape architects need to study the plants behavior with climate change and use wildin.”

Asking her about climate change and the role of the landscape architects, she replied: “landscape architects need to study the plants behavior with climate change and use wilding – plants that establish themselves”. It is a timely answer, as to adapt plants and their habitat to the changing climate worldwide is important for designers today and in the future. Cornelia is always informed about current environmental issues, and shows me the newest books she is reading. When asking her about who influenced her she replies: “her mother Beate Hahn”. Beate Hahn wrote gardening books while living in Berlin, was an avid gardener, educator and a good friend of Karl Förster. But her mother was strict and when they immigrated to the US, Cornelia had to find her own path to landscape architecture. My colleague Susan Herrington has written a very detailed book about Cornelia’s life called: Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape, University Virginia Press 2013 which one should read.

“Already as an 11-year-old child she was inspired by ‘greening the world’”

Asking her ‘why landscape architecture’ she replied: “that already as an 11-year-old child she was inspired by ‘greening the world’”. Also, the experience of being painted with her sister Charlotte, by Sabine Lepsius, a German portrait painter (1864 – 1942) against a forest background had a big impact on her, how she would perceive landscape. This portrait can be seen in the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

When asking about her ‘design principles’ she replied what is important is: “the concept, design development, implementation and site supervision”, and followed up answering to my question on‘obstacles for the profession’ in summarizing: “many obstacles exist for the young professionals with ‘bureaucracy’ and we need to change the attitude for landscapes”. By this she meant, that landscape architecture has a big role to play in design today, it’s not a niche subject anymore.

“Our focus should be on the ‘practice’ of the field, and bureaucratic hurdles should be kept to a minimum.”

Although the conversation was short, her message for the profession is clear, landscape architecture is practiced inside and outside, its medium – the plants and soils are alive, and the landscapes system players, such as climate are changing and we need to adapt. Our focus should be on the ‘practice’ of the field, and bureaucratic hurdles should be kept to a minimum.

Landscape architecture has finally been recognized as an important influential design field worldwide. It is through visionaries, like Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and others, whose work inspires landscape architects to continue to practice and also research ways to improve this practice in this much needed profession. The Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Prize is a ‘giant leap’ for the international landscape architecture profession fifty years after Neil Armstrong said: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) announced the recipients of the Awards of Excellence. This year, 13 projects received a national award. These award-winning projects are preeminent examples of Canadian landscape architecture.

Winners were selected by a national jury of landscape architects. A total of 68 submissions were received. Criteria applied by the jurors included:

The 2020 National Award Recipients are:

2020 National Award | Research
Exterior Living Wall by Outside! by Planning and Studio Design

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Installed in 2010, this exterior living wall has withstood the test of time and offers a solution to carbon sequestration in urban environments, even in cold climates. Outside! Oversaw the feasibility study, research and development of a unique system to withstand our harsh climate. Learnings offer valuable insight as humanity searches for tools to address urban heat island effect, storm water management, pollution and carbon while bringing beauty and nature back into urban environments.

2020 National Award | Planing and Analysis
Rain City Strategy: A Green Rainwater Infrastructure and Rainwater Management Initiative
by City of Vancouver

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The Rain City Strategy re-imagines and transforms how we manage rainwater in the City of Vancouver with the goals of improving water quality, resilience, and livability through creating healthy urban ecosystems. Developed by a multidisciplinary team of landscape architects, planners, engineers, business planners, accountants, and ecologists, the Rain City Strategy outlines a city-wide plan that will revolutionize how we design public spaces and green infrastructure practices.

2020 National Award | Planning and Analysis
Top of the World Highway Interpretive Plan
by NVision Insight Group with Wendy Shearer, Cultural Heritage Specialist

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The Top of the World Highway is one of the nation’s most spectacular scenic drives connecting Dawson, Yukon and Alaska across the Traditional Territory of the Tr’ondek Hwech’in. The landscape architects developed a culturally-rooted framework for communicating their memories, stories, and traditional practices at significant sites in the landscape. The Interpretive Plan approach demonstrates Reconciliation in practice.

2020 National Award | Planning and Analysis
The Meadoway by Perkins and Will

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Located within the Gatineau Hydro Corridor in Scarborough, Ontario, The Meadoway will transform 16 kilometer of highly maintained monoculture into one of the largest urban, linear greenspaces in Canada. Once complete, it will connect Toronto’s downtown with the Don River Valley and Rouge National Park. It will serve as a blueprint for revitalization, a world-class example of active, linear greenspace, and a precedent for future hydro corridor restoration.

2020 National Award | Medium-Scale Landscapes
Aga Khan Garden
by Thomas Woltz, Owner and Principal, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects; Member AALA, BCSLA, OALA

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The recently inaugurated Aga Khan Garden, Alberta is at the heart of the University of Alberta’s Botanic Garden. As the world’s northernmost Islamic garden, it interprets the conceptual and physical manifestations of traditional design principles within the context of Alberta’ climate, ecology, and culture.

2020 National Award | Medium-Scale Landscapes
West Eau Claire Park by O2 Planning + Design

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The project for West Eau Claire Park is a reimagining of a highly-valued public space along the Bow River in Calgary that creates new public amenities while weaving critical flood mitigation measures into the fabric of the park. It helps to build a more beautiful, safe, connected, and vibrant city, while strengthening the city’s resilience to changing climates.

Click here to see the other award winners and their projects.

Text & Pictures © CSLA | AAPC via csla-aapc.ca

Due to disruptions caused by the current pandemic, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) is extending the submission deadline for the 2020 ASLA Student Awards to Sunday, May 31, at 11:59 pm PST.

“ASLA Student Awards are the most prestigious honors for landscape architecture students in the United States and around the world,” said President Wendy Miller, FASLA. “We want to make sure that the program remains a robust reflection of the best and brightest the profession has to offer, so we’re giving students a little more time to get their submissions together.”

The new deadlines are:

Fee deadline: Friday, May 15
Submission deadline: Sunday, May 31, 11:59 pm PST

For further information, including Student Award categories, submission guidelines, and most current deadline updates, visit the Student Award Call for Entries website.

Background on ASLA Student Awards Program

ASLA Student Awards are presented in eight categories: General Design, Residential Design, Urban Design, Analysis & Planning, Research, Communications, Student Collaboration, and Student Community Service. Like the Professional Awards, the jury may select one Award of Excellence and any number of Honor Awards. Selection of an Award of Excellence is at the jury’s discretion and may not be awarded each year.

The “Bund Deutscher Landschaftsarchitekten (bdla) Landesverband Bayern” (Bavarian association of German landscape architects) currently announced the Bavarian Landscape Architecture Prize for the first time. Therein they partnered with the Bavarian Chamber of Architects. The submission deadline is Friday, February 28, 2020.

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The competition considers projects in Bavaria that are characterized by innovative and sustainable outdoor and landscape spaces of high quality, both in new and existing buildings. The Bavarian association of German landscape architects also expressly invites the young generation of planners to take part in the competition in order to promote their professional ideals and visions.

In addition to one main prize, the Bavarian Landscape Architecture Prize 2020, outstanding projects in several categories will be honoured:

Projects that have been realized in Bavaria within the last four years (January 1, 2016 – December 31, 2019) are eligible. All landscape architects from Germany and abroad are eligible to participate.

All information relevant to the competition and access to the registration and submission portal can be found here (only in german).