2024 Class of Fellows, Michele Shelor, FASLA, Arizona Chapter
Colwell Shelor Landscape Architecture, Phoenix, AZ
For more than 23 years, Michele Shelor has led the design of many of the most imaginative and technically challenging projects in the west, creating poetry through landscape and hardscape design, while ensuring environmental stewardship and socially responsible leadership. Her designs are grounded in research into the site's history, context, and societal challenges and the role of design in fostering positive community impact. With a body of work that has been recognized with nearly 60 professional awards, Shelor has been combating the negative impacts of extreme weather through a collaborative and thoughtful design approach, social sensitivities, and desire to improve the physical and mental well-being of clients and community. At Cloud Song, an eight-acre development housing the Indigenous Scholars Institute and Cultural Center and Business School at Scottsdale Community College, the contemporary exterior spaces celebrate and commemorate Native American culture, environmental teachings, and craft, with the design intent to promote conscious inclusion. At Scottsdale's Museum of the West's five-acre site, a high-performance landscape with a series of bioswales provides enhanced green spaces and social amenities and captures 100 percent of the museum's condensate and rainwater runoff. A 2.5-acre property at the base of Camelback Mountain in Paradise Valley was transformed by revegetation and a "ghost wash" that uses all storm water captured by the roof and cascading terraces of alternating patio and garden spaces. One of the terraces acts as a cistern for passive plant irrigation. Shelor has repeatedly demonstrated landscape architecture's power to fuse the ecological, sensory, and spatial characteristics of a site with its region and create a lasting place of integrity.
