Every year, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) holds a design competition to select 30-some projects for award recognition. This year, the nine-person ASLA jury, chaired by Frederick Steiner, ASLA, dean of the College of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, selected 33 award recipients from a field of over 550 entries. The awards will be presented Saturday, October 30 at noon in the Salt Palace Convention Center. The ASLA award categories were:

Design

Analysis and Planning

Research

Communications

This seven-acre lot was abandoned and overgrown. The landscape architecture was grounded in sustainable design and respecting the estuary ecology. The swimming pool, freshwater pond (right) and live oaks look out on Lynnhaven Bay, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States.

The former Seonyudo water purification plant is now a park of water and plant gardens, connected by the original concrete waterways. This aquatic garden was once a basin for chemical dumping for the plant.

A large deck with woven-willow panels overlooks the garden. Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture transformed a sloping yard into a place for children to play by sculpting the slope into a series of zigzagged, ramped walks. The ramping is edged with COR-TEN steel.

The schoolyard fence with images of clouds and the bird and butterfly garden in the foreground creates a colorful learning environment for the second largest elementary school in the country.

Previously occupied by an old house, this area is now a roadside rest area that doubles as a meeting space for the Japanese villagers of this agricultural region of Japan. The site is a significant rest and meeting space for village residents and visitors.

Peirce’s Woods, Longwood’s newest destination, encompasses seven acres of mature woodlands. The Austrinum Walk contains full-size Rhododendron austriums from the Longwood nursery, planted in the woods in gradations from pale yellow to deep orange.

The Rijksmuseum courtyard and caf????(C) is a restful spot for museum goers. Golden rain trees highlight the southeast courtyard. The rhomboidal pool and the gravel planes in two shades of grey provide interesting geometries.

This garden on Turtle Creek mediates glass, limestone, concrete house, and the vegetated slope descending into Turtle Creek. The exposed aggregate steps are spaced at irregular intervals.

The lower Bluestone Terrace of General Mills?EUR??,,????'??? new 324,000 square foot office building.

The Eastbank Esplanade of the Willamette River features a 1,000-foot long floating walkway, promenade and continuous seat wall, plazas, overlooks, a cantilevered walkway, bioengineered banks, lighting, interpretive site amenities, public art, and a 70-foot tower that connects the trail to an existing bridge and landscape improvements.

A view of the 500 Area Discovery Park, once the grounds of a WPA-style parks and recreation building, shows the reforestation of birch and aspen trees.

This subcenter of greater Tokyo, Saitama Plaza, is expected to relieve the access congestion to the older central districts of the city. The illumination is underlit glass paving from the retail level below. During the winter this space is an ice rink. Zelkova trees decorate the plaza in the background.

The Lever House landscape restoration brings back the original planting design of 1953. The sculpture is a Noguchi. (Editor?EUR??,,????'???s note: Please see ?EUR??,,????'??Isamu Noguchi?EUR??,,????'???s Playground Designs?EUR??,,????'?? in the Sept issue.)

The American Center lies in an oxbow of the Napa River with a main entry consisting of an 825-foot gravel path lined with poplars and paved in golden decomposed granite. The reflecting pond and the parking areas are planted with grapevines and native grasses. Framed by stone walls, the gardens can be viewed from a grid of gravel paths.

The Cedar River Watershed Education Center connects Seattle residents with the source of their water and area?EUR??,,????'???s natural history. The project incorporates five small buildings, a series of outdoor courtyards, green roofs and an allee of large maples.

The aim of the Downtown Ottawa Urban Design Strategy 2020 is to improve the urban experience of the area by enhancing the quality of the public realm and urban environment, including city streets, parks and open spaces, waterways, and areas of special character.

This project aims to create a new waterfront for D.C. along the Anacostia River. This view is Kingman Island with new wetlands and a nature center. The plan employs design to illustrate how strategies set forth might be realized.

The focus of this project is the Haarlemmermeer Polder, reclaimed agricultural land near Amsterdam. The site, which suffers from poor water management, is a pilot project to combine the use of this land with low-density housing.

The new campus residential neighborhoods at the University of California, Davis aim to accommodate nearly 7,000 new students and supporting faculty and staff in the next decade. There is a the desire to maintain the city’s urban village character and high quality of life; and the pressing concerns generated by the statewide energy crisis of 2001.

The Middle Rio Grande Bosque Restoration Project allowed landscape architects to integrate ecosystem restoration, recreation planning, cultural and environmental landscape interpretation, environmental justice, and community outreach. It aims to balance and integrate its function as both a wildlife refuge and a regional open space in a major metropolitan area.

Harlem?EUR??,,????'???s Hudson River waterfront has received funding from a neighborhood coalition, the city, the state, and federal agencies to assess the waterfront, develop a master plan for the area bounded by 125th Street and 135th Street, Broadway and the Hudson River. The bottom image is the present view; the top image is the new design.

The Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge in Forth Worth, Texas, is one of the largest nature centers in the U.S. The center?EUR??,,????'???s location on the edge of the city limits challenges its mission of preserving nature.

Belle Isle is a 982-acre island in the Detroit River near the heart of downtown Detroit. The new park plan focuses on improving the public domain and finding sources of revenue to support renovations.

Mayo Woodlands is a new residential community along the Zumbrota River on a 220-acre parcel of farmland, meadows, and rolling woodlands. The Mayo family hired the landscape architect to develop a site and landscape strategy.

This project presents a 20-year strategy for the social, cultural, environmental, and economic recovery of an industrial corridor and highly contaminated superfund site in Boston.

The groundwater from this garden was mined from an adjacent creek and analyzed to determine its effect on the salmonid?EUR??,,????'???s life cycle. It identified the need to provide better ecological design.

Half My World explores Anne Spencer?EUR??,,????'???s garden design with recycled architectural fragments.

This volume features botanical prints, lithographs, garden plans, historic photographs, and contemporary photography of the garden history of the antebellum South. The front cover is the Jenkins Mikell townhouse and garden in Charleston, South Carolina built in 1853.