The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) on July 11 announced the recipients of its 2005 Professional Awards. The jury selected 33 projects to receive awards from a field of over 520 entries. This year marks the launch of a new category of residential design, which is cosponsored by Garden Design magazine. ASLA will present the awards October 10 at the society’s annual meeting in Fort Lauderdale.

General design
Awards of Excellence

The Kreielsheimer Promenade at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, by Gustaftson Guthrie Nichol Ltd., for the Seattle Center Foundation
The Kreielsheimer Promenade is a subtly undulating, brightly lighted open space between two campus buildings. Some 19,000 square feet, it serves as one of a series of pedestrian corridors that accommodate hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Seattle Center annually. A significant portion of the promenade is a rooftop plaza, built over mechanical rooms below. A glowing “ceiling” is implied in the promenade by a series of translucent metal scrims floating overhead. The quality of light shows the regular flux of the Pacific Northwest skies changing throughout the day. At night, choreographed light allows the public and patrons to experience the theatrical events within the space. The 2,500-square-foot water feature reflects the sky, scrims, and lightings at night. Sheets of water 1/4 inch thick cover three tilted panels of stone paving. This project “treats water differently than any project in memory,” said the jury. “It gets us to the point where we’re attending to where we are.”
Photo © Gareth Loveridge, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd.

The Heart of the Park at Hermann Park, Houston, by SWA Group, with conceptual design collaboration consultants Olin Partnership Ltd., for the Hermann Park Conservancy/City of Houston Parks and Recreation Department
The 1936 plan for this, the flagship in Houston’s park system, had never been fully realized. A significant component of the original park vision is the Hermann Park Reflection Pool, which had been only partially conceived and was in poor condition, and therefore very underutilized. So, in 1992, with only 20 percent of the park’s original space remaining, the city acted to reclaim the original vision for the park and, by doing so, return a large useable open space to the public. In an international design competition, the Rice Design Alliance invited designers to respond to the needs of a diverse population and set the tone for Houston’s public presence through the redesign of “The Heart of the Park.” The restoration and completion of “The Heart of the Park” became the generative force behind the reactivation of a delightful 18.5-acre space. The 80-foot wide by 740-foot long reflection pool establishes the formal central axis for the space. “Civic art is back and it’s really working,” declared the jury. They termed the project a “lovely contrast from out in the open and to the back.”
Photo courtesy of the SWA Group.

Awards of Honor

Toyota Motor Sales, USA Inc., South Campus, Torrance, Calif., by LPA, Inc., for Toyota Motor Sales, USA Inc.
The jury deemed this project “compelling and convincing” as well as a “significant, strong composition.” The landscape derives from a modern interpretation of Moorish garden design: The weaving of interior and exterior spaces creates garden rooms that are an extension of the work environment. The project, part of a larger campus scheme, offers office space in three-story buildings surrounded by lush garden landscape. Each of the offices in all of the buildings looks into a garden space. Each garden is accessible to the associates and specifically designed to provide accompanying break-out space and allow for traditionally indoor activities to be brought outdoors. It’s highly environmentally sensitive features have earned it a USGBC LEED™ Gold Certification.
Photo © Chris Crostea.

Ben Gurion International Airport, Lod, Israel, by Shlomo Aronson Architects, for the Israeli Airport Authority
The architects wanted this landscape garden to feel welcoming for all people coming into Israel, whether they are coming as citizens, pilgrims, tourists, or businesspeople. The landscape area is divided into 65 acres, which includes the interchange and approach roads, and the courtyard-like central garden (5 acres), bounded on one end by the main entrance way and on opposing sides by the two large parking structures. The architect’s overall approach related strongly to the agricultural landscape of the surroundings by planting new citrus groves on a massive scale (4,500 grapefruit and orange trees). The central garden is an abstraction of the natural region with its particular topography and its manmade agricultural development, graphically presented to the view of the passers-by. The central garden area tilts down toward the terminal, divided in terraces rising to the back to a total height of 15 feet, and cuts sharply at the edges. This project “reconceives pedestrian environment of the airport,” according to the jury. “It takes regional landscape types and expresses them beautifully.”
Project photography by Shlomo Aronson, Barbara Aronson, and Liya Kochavi.

Shenyang Architectural University Campus, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, China, by the Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture and Turenscape, for the Shenyang Architectural University Campus
This design for a new suburban campus to replace its overburdened urban predecessor had to incorporate a viable agricultural irrigation system that was still in place, a small budget, and a very short design and construction timeframe. The design also seeks to demonstrate how inexpensive and productive agricultural landscape can become usable space as well through careful design and management. Its major features include a productive campus rice paddy. Not only designed to be a campus with small open platforms, spanning the landscape, the campus is also a completely functional rice paddy, complete with its own system of irrigation. Management and student participation become part of the productive landscape. The farming processes can potentially become a laboratory for students and the faculty as well. “This will put the students directly in touch with agriculture,” said the jury. “The biggest stroke is to put test plots in the middle of campus.”
Photo © Kongjian Yu, Chao Yang.

Stanford University Medical School Campus Underground Parking Garage, Palo Alto, Calif., by Peter Walker and Partners, for Stanford University
This “boxed meadow” atop an underground parking garage provides a major new accessible open space in the center of the medical campus with courts and walkways lighted for safe and convenient pedestrian use on warm summer nights. The garage design references agricultural history by means of seat-high wooden walls, which recall the wooden slews, water coolers, and agricultural retaining walls of early California ranches and farms. These seat walls, made of ipe wood, which weathers naturally to a soft silvery gray, form large separated boxes that create a rustic park of alleys and courts. In the boxes that lie over the garage structure, the shallow soil is planted with a complex mix of California native meadow grasses and wildflowers that bloom throughout the spring and the long Palo Alto summer. In areas beyond are planted large live oaks, which relate to the native oaks that have been preserved throughout the medical campus. The jury found it “incredible for a university to make a decision to do this . . .[it’s] evocative of a different place.”
Photography by Tim Wright and James A. Lord.

12,000 Factory Workers Meet Ecology in the Parking Lot, Canton, Ga., by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., for Herman Miller Inc.
The landscape architects graded the entire 22-acre building site at 5 percent to place the factory on a level base, so that water would sheet drain from impervious areas into wetlands constructed for the purpose, thereby eliminating the need for curbs, pipes, and manholes. They divided the parking lot into three bays that drain into wetlands planted with grasses, forbs, and sedges. When dry, these areas become meadows. The edges of these wetland trays transition to 10- to 15-foot-wide thickets of floodplain trees. Using grading, planting, environmental stewardship, and site organization, the parking lot became part of a thriving ecological system that neutralizes the impacts of runoff, provides habitat for wildlife, and offers a compelling arrival and departure experience to the three-shift factory’s employees. The jury praised the project’s “ingenious hydrology” and “creative initiative by the landscape architect to serve the best interests of client and community.”
Photo © Ron Anton Rocz.

Illinois Institute of Technology Campus, Chicago, by Peter Lindsay Schaudt Landscape Architecture Inc., for the Illinois Institute of Technology
Over the past five years, the landscape architects have been working to construct a viable, dynamic, and coherent setting for the academic community at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). This plan encompasses projects connected by a larger vision to revitalize the campus developed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe working with landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. The projects include: the State Street Boulevard revitalization, developing Crown Hall Field into an honorific and welcoming landscape that marks Crown Hall as the center of the IIT campus; realignment of Federal Street, which included a crushed-stone forecourt flanked by woodland trees and perennials, in front of the historic pre-Miesian Main Building; State Street Village courtyards; and the Crown Hall planting restoration, currently in progress. The jury found this “very subtle and appropriate” campus plan to be an “important work type: revegetating, reestablishing viable natural habitat.”
Photo © Leslie Schwartz.

Ute Cemetery Restoration, Aspen, Colo., by BHA Design, Inc., for the City of Aspen Community Development Department
“Responsible work … involves the community … a great story!” said the jury of this restoration of a pioneers’ burial ground, the oldest in Aspen. Ute Cemetery is a simple hillside covered in plants and mountain bike trails. In the late 1990s the city came under pressure from a group of local veterans who felt the city should honor its veterans and recover the grace of this historic setting. The total life of the cemetery spanned from 1880-1940. After 1940, only two burials occurred and the site began a cycle of decay. The design team’s first step was to try to locate all of the graves possible; no easy task, since there was no plan nor order to the burials. To assist in the recovery, a major volunteer effort was undertaken. In all, more than 210 gravesites were discovered, although only 78 were marked with headstones. The landscape architect designed a low brick monument sign, a series of small gravel pathways and a small fence reflecting the character of the historic fence.
Photo © Ron Sladek.

Capitol Plaza, New York City, by Thomas Balsley Associates, for Witcoff Group/Adell Corporation
Capitol Plaza, located in the emerging residential neighborhood of Chelsea Heights, features garden seating areas, a promenade, and cafes. In an area of Manhattan with too few public open spaces, Capitol Plaza’s goal was to offer people a place to pause among lush bamboo groves and ornamental grass plantings, distinctive contemporary seating and adjacent cafes and shops—all in a synergistic composition on a quarter acre that will ensure long-term success. Curved, battered planter walls slice through the plaza, organizing it into distinct areas with varying degrees of intimacy and enclosure. A 100-foot-long, orange corrugated metal wall draws attention; its elliptical cutouts reveal bamboo foliage behind and frame a stainless steel waterspout whose sounds add a serene quality to the bamboo glade environment. The jury admired the scale of the project, terming it “a lot of environments in a very small space ... affordable and budget-minded.”
Photo © Michael Koontz.

Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, Coldwater/Johnston Recreation Complex, Castle Rock, Wash., by Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture, EDAW Inc., and the USDA Forest Service, for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest/Mount St. Helens National Volcano Monument
Twenty-five years after the eruption of Mount St. Helens, the mountain’s majesty still demands attention as it rebuilds and reforests itself. Conceived on a master plan level as a “60-mile ecclesiastic experience,” the immolated past is laid bare in this “surreal landscape of prostrate trees, denuded soils, and funereal memorials.” The Coldwater Ridge Visitors Center takes the crescent shape of the volcano and imposes an arrow oriented to the crater. A network of paths threads visitors through the devastated cloisters where great trees once stood. Moving from drop off to the earth-sheltered observatory, visitors walk an ash-laden arc that has been sliced through the ridge. The volcano emerges from beyond the balcony overlook. With a 2,000-foot drop and the looming mountain just five miles distant, “the choreography of the landscape ends on a teetering altar,” according to the landscape architect. “Talk about a sense of place!” the jury exclaimed.
Photo © Andrew Buchanan.

Parc Diagonal Mar, Barcelona, by EDAW Inc. and EMBT Arquitectes, for Hines Spain Regional Office
Parc Diagonal Mar provides the opportunity for the public to use an urban site along Barcelona’s waterfront that was once a vacant brownfield and has become a catalyst for redevelopment of the surrounding beach area. This major public space—part of the Diagonal Mar, a $900 million, 10-year redevelopment project—was in its former life a railyard among industrial buildings. The 34-acre park connects the new development with hundreds of thousands of residents with surrounding working class neighborhoods and the Mediterranean Sea. The park offers playgrounds, a waterfall, shaded seating areas, sports facilities, an outdoor café, fountains, and viewing mounds, grouped around a large central lake with many fountains and sprays and is linked by paths that lead to the sea. One jury member called the project the “best constructed wetlands I’ve ever seen … this is a big success.”
Photo © Dixi Carrillo.

Residential design
In the category of residential design, cosponsored with Garden Design magazine, the following projects received awards:

Award of Excellence

Stone Meadow, Martha's Vineyard, Mass., by Stephen Stimson Associates (pictured, photo © Charles Mayer Photography)

Award of Honor

• Cane River Residence, Natchitoches, La., by Jeffrey Carbo Landscape Architects/Site Planners
• Private residential garden, Minneapolis, by oslund.and.assoc.
• Island Modern, Key West, Fla., by Raymond Jungles Inc.
• Private Residence/Garden of Planes, Richmond, Va., by Gregg Bleam Landscape Architects
• Private Residence, Rowena, Ore., by Koch Landscape Architecture
• Ivy Street Roof Garden, San Francisco, by Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture
• Livingood Residence, Jackson, Wyo., by VLA Inc.
• Reyrosa Ranch, Waxahachie, Tex., by MESA Design Group

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