The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) announced the winners of their 2013 ASLA Professional Awards, granting landscape design projects from around the world prestigious titles as top works within the field of landscape architecture. The competition included five categories: general design, residential design, analysis and planning, communications, and research. Entries are judged on their quality, context, and effectiveness, and for the two actual design categories, on their environmental sustainability and sensitivity. This year, the winning designs range from an urban revitalization in New Orleans to a book of photographic reflection on the built landscape.
General Design Category
Lakewood Garden Mausoleum at Lakewood Cemetery
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Halvorson Design Partnership, Inc.
ASLA Project Statement:
The 142-year-old Lakewood Cemetery faced a challenge: how to create a commemorative 21st century space within a revered, landmark setting. The Garden Mausoleum project meets this challenge adroitly, sustainably and gracefully. With the landscape enveloping two thirds of the building within a south-facing slope, architecture opens out onto an expansive, peaceful landscape with a quiet reflecting pool, groves of native trees and contemplative alcoves—a distinctly contemporary design in harmony with its historic environment.
Residential Design Category
Sagaponack Residence
Sagaponeck, New York
LaGuardia Design Landscape Architects
ASLA Project Statement:
In order to save their beloved house from the incessant and inevitably threatening encroachment of the Atlantic Ocean, the owners of this 1970’s award winning “Record House” were willing to relocate their home in a more protected site.
The house was then relocated some 400 feet further inland to the middle of a flat cornfield. The challenge for the Landscape Architect was to gracefully ensconce the simultaneously enlarged structure within a recreated landscape of undulating, grassy sand dunes and meadows, regenerating the natural environment lost with the erosion, but the ultimate goal of this project was to fabricate a self-sustaining landscape able to naturally grow for creating a resistant environment against the aggression of natural elements.
Analysis and Planning Category
Lafitte Greenway + Revitalization Corridor | Linking New Orleans Neighborhoods
New Orleans, Louisiana
Design Workshop, Inc.
ASLA Project Statement:
As one of the first revitalization projects since the devastation of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the 3.1-mile linear Lafitte Greenway will become a vibrant, multi-modal transportation corridor linking residents to the heart of New Orleans, Louisiana. The landscape architect led a multi-disciplinary effort—incorporating public input, synthesizing many measurable objectives and working across a range of scales—to transform an old industrial rail corridor into a celebrated Greenway.
Communications Category
Visible | Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand
Reed Hilderbrand, LLC.
ASLA Project Statement:
Visible | Invisible explores the preoccupations, influences, themes, and challenges that shape how the principals and designers at Reed Hilderbrand reflect on their work. In contrast to the recent tendency to illustrate conceptual depth through diagram, three-dimensional illustration, and process drawings, this book relies on photographic representations of built work—through the interpretive lens of an artist and through plan drawings—to evidence consistency in approach and outcome. The result is an expository work that speaks of values, convictions, and aspirations toward humanistic achieve.
Research Category
Green Roof Innovation Testing (GRIT) Laboratory
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design
ASLA Project Statement:
The Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (GRIT Lab) is a state-of-the-art research facility and the only one of its kind in North America that studies the optimization of green roof performance. GRIT Lab includes real time data monitoring and ongoing field observation to study the metrics associated with ‘green’ technologies in order to provide an unprecedented, comprehensive, dynamic and hands-on understanding of the water–energy–biology nexus in context of regional and climate specific priorities.
