2011 ASLA Student Awards

Vertical Territories proposes the redevelopment of South Weymouth Naval Air Station as productive open space. It promotes alternative energy innovation, habitat preservation, floodwater management and freshwater conservation through a layered approach that allows for functional density without compromising the expansive quality of the ground plane. The project uses technology and conservation to stitch together adjacent but disconnected urban centers and serves as a prototype for urban planni

The pervasive societal view of arable soils is that of an unlimited resource. Our construction practices not only destroy them, but rely on imported soils in order to function. As cities continue to sprawl they deplete a key asset necessary to both the stability and health of any growing population. CO-MODIFICATION addresses soil sustainability by posing a new landscape paradigm in which the remediation of healthy soils becomes a by-product of urban living.

As a 275-acre swath of green in the geographic center of the city, Chattanooga Central Park creates a destination in an underserved area for all of Chattanooga to enjoy. By consolidating three existing, but underutilized open spaces, the new park system would activate the existing sites and the surrounding neighborhoods by providing diverse and flexible programming, establishing ecologically beneficial features and by creating development opportunities outside of the downtown district.

By appropriating a site's environmental systems a new framework for design is developed.  This design method is open, responsive, and mutable to an environment's change over time.  This architectural language built on ecological process is speculatively executed to imagine future potentials for a batture landscape along the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge.  Suffering from the consequences of the levee's design, the site and proposed design method speak to the necessary potential of marrying

This large park proposal features an extremely unique and dynamic set of landscape conditions, as it hosts the nation's largest scaled hydraulic model of the Mississippi River Basin. Through a complete restoration of the model, the park would become infused with various recreational opportunities. Not only will this park serve as a link between the Natchez Trace and the city of Jackson, Mississippi, it will serve to attract local visitors, regional visitors, and tourists intere

The coal generating station in Michigan City, Indiana is one of a series of industrial complexes which have dominated the shoreline of Lake Michigan for decades, bringing with them pollution of ground and water and crippled shorelines. This design solution utilizes the framework of industrial infrastructure to return the site to ecological and community function; as ecological processes develop through a series of phases, human inhabitation brings the site to life.

This proposal for a 990-acre cemetery just east of Austin, Texas draws parallels between the human cycle of life and death and the geological cycle of sedimentation and erosion. The site is shaped by fluvial processes, resulting in two major swales which organize the zones of disposition, each formed as a cut in the earth. The detailing of the burial plots themselves highlight the act of sedimentation and the continual change that occurs over time.

Baltimore Water Works utilizes the unique resilience of river delta ecosystems to create a hybridized landscape infrastructure that unites ecological health with urban vitality. This adaptive framework, designed for Baltimore's Jones Falls River corridor, employs the functional river ecology to reinvigorate abandoned and economically depressed areas within the city's core, and to create a model for stability that allows urban density to both contract and expand.

Urban Arboriculture functions as a hybrid set of spaces bridging the performance of productive landscapes with parkland program.  The resultant parks aim to assist the city by cultivating nursery and wetland stock for greening projects, while serving as learning and recreation centers for adjacent neighborhoods.

At the threshold of industry, infrastructure, and the degraded water edge, the Bay Trail is fragmented at Brooklyn Basin. Leveraging these rich adjacencies, the proposed design opens up access to the Bay and knits the trail back together through a series of docks, piers and gardens.  The Bay edge is transformed to create increased diversity of terrestrial and aquatic habitats. Immersive tectonic experiences arise, providing spaces for cultural and educational engagement while promoting stewar

With the advent of a new commercial port, Fiumicino, a small town near Rome International Airport, would embrace its inevitable, but dynamic urbanization. Recognizing the structural force of landscape, the project responds to site's predicament between infrastructure construction, incompatibility with development and emerging urbanism, by proposing a territorial scale landscape framework to steer foregoing issues towards synergy to construct an environmental scaffold, celebrating and interact

Skating the Emerald Necklace reimagines Evans Way Park, a small public park along Boston's Emerald Necklace, as a dual-functioning skate park that blends skater, pedestrian and storm water flow in a continuous mobius strip of circulation. Morphing the existing Olmstedian-influenced design into a kind of post-punk pastoral, Evans Way becomes Boston's first skate park, filling a city-wide programmatic need, while embracing the diverse forms of circulation within contemporary urban spac

Site located along the banks of Delaware River, Philadelphia. As the one of the two waterways between which the first capital of the United States was founded. Project’s goal is to build the understanding of establishment of a clear, robust territorial framework vision for the entirety of the project area and find out the possible strategies to mitigate the sea level rise issue and trying to develop the ability to make effective contributions to urban design problems.

This project provides a portable herb handbook for migrant families who live in containers. Based on the survey and poll of the local folk, this project is aimed to provide migrants with a timely supply of medicine, to create a seemly landscape pattern and to improve the life quality more effective. Moreover, to fit the frequent migration of those families, the herb handbook can be easily relocated with the container entity anywhere as an entirety. With this new style Portable herb handbook,

Water management and a progressive nature infrastructure system are essential to the making of a sustainable urban environment. With current technologies cities can greatly decrease water use while simultaneously increasing nature in urban environments. Having the effect of creating healthier, cooler and more livable cities.

This project is an embodiment of both environmental design and technology in order to reclaim one of New York's heavily disturbed, post-industrial waterfronts.  The vacant corridor of the Gowanus Canal, located in Brooklyn N.Y., punctuates the landscape with unacceptable socioeconomic deterioration and abandonment. With potential for spontaneous and creative use, this site can become a place for renewed experience of the urban waterfront whose edge embraces rather than eradicates the natural

Taking the vast expense of a large infrastructural project and turning it into an amenity can be achieved through distributing the infrastructure throughout the community. It is possible to create a resilient canal system for New Orleans which deals with water storage throughout the city, creating a green network through which the community can be redefined. Each infrastructure piece has the potential to be beautiful, have significant economic impact and provide much needed greenspace.

Bolsa Intervention proposes a reconfiguration of the infrastructure at Bolsa Chica Wetlands to treat regional storm water runoff and provide an opportunity for biological productivity in local habitats to be greatly increased. This restructuring of the site will also make key connections to the adjacent communities, drawing people in and fulfilling their innately human need to experience the wild and intricate forces at play in the environment.

The rapid shrinking of Lake Chad — by over 90 percent in the past 40 years — is emblematic of increasing global water insecurity. With or Without Water considers how technologies used to prevent desertification and sustain livelihoods in the Lake Chad Basin can be designed to succeed where they have failed in the past.  Shelterbelt plantings are paired with transportation infrastructure and incrementally deployed as Lake Chad's shoreline recedes.  The system provides a resilient scaf

Hope Municipal Airport is located 6 miles Northwest of Hope, Arkansas, a town of approximately 10, 000 people. Originally established as a military airport during World War II, it was one of the largest of its kind. More recently, it has housed 15,000 relief trailers manufactured for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA spent $2.7 billion to buy 145,000 mobile homes and trailers in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane season

By tapping into the unique culture of neighboring communities as well as providing program along the water's edge this strategy is both sensitive to existing conditions while promoting forward thinking & ecologically sound development.

A combination of gateways + linear parks stretch along the piers pulling residents and visitors to what is currently a neglected waterfront. To establish these connections, the public must feel invited. This concept proposes thresholds under

'Envisioning Francisville's Future' is a comprehensive analysis and planning project based in the socially, economically, and physically degraded Philadelphia neighborhood of Francisville. Sophomore landscape architecture students undertook a unique, thorough process of studying and applying lessons from planning and design texts, local case studies, an extensive site inventory and analysis; community aspirations; sustainable initiatives, and the McHargian method of regional analysis to devel

'Big Old Tree; New Big Easy' recognizes New Orleans' old, native trees as purest forms of sustainability and seeks to harness and build upon their inherent ecological adaptations and social significance. By recognizing the trees as mitigators of water, shapers and influencers of social space, and sources of industry, the plan envisions how native trees could be used to revitalize and strengthen the hydrological, social, and economic conditions of Iberville and the Lafitte Corridor.

What's your favorite place and why? CityFabric is a simple, yet effective way of using maps to talk about your place, physically and experientially. CityFabric uses diagrammatic figure-ground maps to depict cities in an abstract and graphically innovative way via T-shirts and hand stretched prints. Deemed "urban landscape and design" you can wear, CityFabric presents a set of valuable tools for any citizen (not just designers) to visually tell a story and initiate a dialogue about t

Boxed + Shipped was an installation which invited the viewers to explore the concept of "in the box" thinking. The 15'x10'x8' cardboard box is symbolic of an undergraduate landscape architecture curriculum. Within the box are the various materials, concepts, and techniques that have been expressed to us as the definition of landscape architecture. Outside the box, the viewers are exposed to the many means and methods students undertake to reinterpret the curriculums ideologies.

Landscape Invocation is a website devoted to the betterment of landscape architecture students and professionals around the globe as well as the presentation of resources for the enhancement of the field. The website utilizes current event coverage, park, book, and designer reviews, global mapping of projects, as well as editorials to uniquely convey information about the growing profession of landscape architecture in a method that is both interactive and dynamic.

UC Berkeley Extension's unique Landscape Architecture program caters to a diverse student body. With most students commuting from around the Bay Area, a group of enterprising students created Extended Landscape, Exland.org, a social/ learning media website, to link students and faculty and, in turn, creating a vibrant truly Virtual Campus. The site, popular among the students, provides a resource for members to communicate and collaborate, as well as to view a

In 2009 the City of Phoenix set the goal to increase the tree canopy coverage of the city from its current 8-10% to 25% by the year 2030. This project investigates the realistic potential of the canopy coverage goal, and makes recommendations to the city based on research that can be used to help achieve the goal, as well as create a template for other cities to increase funding allocated to street trees.

The rural American farm is structurally defined by the United States Farm Bill. The policies and programs outlined in the bill influence the economic and cultural viability of the productive farm and directly shape the form and function of the land. This project investigates the systems, spaces, and products privileged by the bill and speculates on the embedded potential to rethink productivity in urban and suburban landscapes using a systems-based approach to transformation.

This research focuses on the possible hydrological, infrastructural and social applications of the Vetiver System - an affordable bioengineering technology – in the watershed of a highly polluted lake near Guatemala City, and how the construction of a wetland park displaying the different uses of Vetiver Grass could teach people how to participate in a movement to clean the lake. Interviews, research and data collection were conducted in Guatemala, Chile, Australia and Indonesia.

The youth of Croatia grapple with guilt, confusion and hopelessness in the debilitating aftermath of a corrosive war. To facilitate healing, a collaborative, community-based process was employed with the staff and students of Ucenicki Dom "Podmurvice: to design and build a series of outdoor therapeutic spaces. This project exemplifies how service learning can improve the quality of life for those transitioning from war to reconciliation by strengthening inclusion, ecological stewardship,

This project dealt with the challenge of preserving the fragile culture and environment of an indigenous Ecuadorian community while simultaneously developing sustainable growth. Community participation and the collaborative process were the most vital components to the success of the master plan and schematic designs developed. Students of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Planning worked together to protect the local culture, environment, and economy by designing sustainable developm

Venice symbolizes the strange beauty that is possible when human habitation adapts itself to extreme environmental surroundings. Sea level rise and climate change place the Venetian lagoon at a critical juncture in its existence and necessitate new techniques of adaptation. Terra Nova proposes a new, more flexible set of methods to build ground, improve biodiversity, and permit human access to this critical process in order to allow this very unique city and ecosystem to survive.

The project concept splits, folds, and stretches the conventional idea of a "bench," to accommodate numerous activities, and formally responds to the variable positions in which one might “sit”. The structural profile corresponds to function, providing an outdoor classroom, performance platform and social space that responds to existing site conditions. The design/build project allowed students to develop a broad range of skills, and manifests a pedagogical shift towards collaborati