LARBF’s Wayne Grace Design Award

A team of Arizona State University students is the winner of the 2008 Wayne Grace Design Competition, sponsored by the Landscape Architectural Registration Boards Foundation (LARBF).

The Wayne Grace Design Competition recognizes outstanding student examples of landscape architectural work that clearly show how the practice of landscape architecture and licensing affects quality of life.

Tyler Stradling, Benjamin McDowell and Michael Nicoli were enrolled in ASU’s College of Design – School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture program and had started working on a project, titled “Integrating Habitats: Development as a Catalyst for Restoration”, as part of their curriculum.

They later learned about the Wayne Grace competition from one of their professors, Kenneth McCown, and submitted the “Integrating Habitats” school project for the competition. The team also submitted this project to – and won – this year’s Integrating Habitats Design Competition in Portland, Oregon.

“For the design, we were taking ideas we learned from school, things we’d studied independently, and innovative and new emerging green ideas,” Stradling said of their inspiration. He said the team put a lot of time into studying storm water retention and being able to reuse that storm water on site.

“The construction method was also something we felt was really important. We used a pre-fab construction method that would reduce the footprint of the site and help to maintain and preserve the natural area as well,” Stradling said.

The overall winning award was $3,000 (each member of the team received $1,000), and it was presented last week as part of the Council for Landscape Architectural Registration Boards (CLARB) Annual Meeting in San Diego. Courtesy of LARBF, Stradling, who graduated from ASU in May, traveled to the meeting to accept the award. McDowell recently accepted a job with a builder in Dubai, and Nicoli is currently finishing his degree.

LARBF, the sponsor of the competition, is a 501©(3) nonprofit charitable organization that is actively engaged in advancing licensure for landscape architects.