A Homecoming for 2018 ASLA Award Recipients
Several PennDesign faculty, alumni, and students will be honored by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) at the Annual Meeting and EXPO in Philadelphia next month.
Announced last week, the ASLA Professional Awards recognize the best of landscape architecture in the general design, analysis and planning, communications, research and residential design categories from the United States and around the world.
Richard Weller, Meyerson Chair of Urbanism and Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture and co-Director of the McHarg Center at PennDesign, received an Honor Award for his web-based publication Atlas for the End of the World (Atlas for the Beginning of the Anthropocene), which surveys the status of, and conflicts between, conservation, land-use, and urban growth in the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots.
Alumna Anne Whiston Spirn (MLA’74), who is the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received a Communications Honor Award for Marnas: A Journey through Space, Time, and Ideas an innovative website that provides the first public access to the garden laboratory of master designer/theorist Sven-Ingvar Andersson. Earlier this year, Spirn claimed the Design Mind Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
The firm of Professor Emeritus James Corner received an award for its design of Tongva Paarl and Ken Genser Square in Santa Monica, CA, which transformed a former parking lot into a lush landscape of rolling hills, meadows, and gardens.
Two PennDesign students received ASLA Student Awards. Douglas A. Breuer’s redesign of MoMA’s Sculpture Garden was recognized for being “provocative on so many levels . . . totally transgressive both in that materiality and in terms of its contextual juxtaposition of cultural domestic elements in the MoMA garden.” Cyrus Sohrab Khan’s submission, focusing on the woodlands of Rajasthan, was applauded as “some of the most beautiful drawings in any of the submissions.”
PennDesign was also represented in the ASLA 2018 Honors Recipients, the highest awards the organization presents each year. As announced in June, alumna Linda Jewell (MLA’75), a professor emerita at University of California, Berkeley, was selected to receive the ASLA medal. The Landscape Architecture Firm Award went to Andropogon Associates, a firm whose founder and partners, including Carol Franklin (MLA’65), José M. Almiñana, and Yaki Miodovnik, have taught at PennDesign.
The winners will receive their awards on October 22 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.