Landscape Architecture Magazine September 2025

THOMAS BALSLEY, FASLA (“2025 ASLA Professional Awards,” page 118), managing principal at SWA/Balsley, has transformed urban waterfronts and parks for 40 years. You can contact him at tbalsley@swabalsley.com. “ The quality and diversity of the projects were simply astonishing and struck us all with a burst of pride in our profession and its impact on our daily lives and environmental future.” HALEY BLAKEMAN, FASLA (“2025 ASLA Student Awards,” page 42), the Gulf Coast resilience and planning lead for Moffatt & Nichol, focuses on empowering communities facing climate impacts where land meets water. You can follow her on Instagram @haleyblakeman. “ Each student’s passions clearly guided their designs. It was my pleasure to facilitate the conversation with this outstanding group, many of whom had won ASLA Student Awards themselves.” DIANA FERNANDEZ BIBEAU,…

It seems that each year the gulf between the wild ambition of ASLA Award-winning student projects and the polished hypercompetence of the ASLA Professional Award winners grows wider. But this time, something less expected rippled through one of the more hidebound categories, Residential Design, and for once, the students weren’t keeping up. The abundant, iterative Award of Excellence winner by STIMSON, And the Wild Comes Right Up to the Door, and the canny, suburban-yard-scale inventions of The Little Project by Ping Design arrived like a cool breeze blown into this category, dusting out cobwebs and conventions. In fact, all the residential award winners stood out in different ways this year, including Design Workshop’s Inez Point—a project in which the house actually got smaller and the landscape got more ambitious; Matthew…

For most kids growing up in Watts, nature is a distant fantasy. This densely populated South Los Angeles neighborhood has roughly half as much tree canopy as the citywide average, and what few parks exist are mostly ball fields and unshaded lawns. Residents of Jordan Downs, a 700-unit public housing complex, have had an especially contentious relationship with their environment, characterized by historic—and, in some cases, continuing—battles with the city’s housing authority over unsafe levels of air, water, and soil pollution. When Tina Chee Landscape Studio was hired to design a pair of gateway parks for the redevelopment of Jordan Downs, founder Tina Chee, ASLA, says she “really wanted to emphasize nature. We approached it [less] like a park and more like a botanical garden.” The full redevelopment will introduce…

Conceptualized as a shared street with a sinuous traffic lane and expanded pedestrian spaces, the redesign of Copenhagen’s Krakas Square and the adjacent roadway needed to balance an ethos of material reuse with the neighbors’ desire that it not appear cobbled together. According to BOGL, the landscape architect, in public hearings the residents expressed disappointment that their neighborhood renovation would be made with used materials. In response, BOGL designed benches made from the concrete pavers ubiquitous in Danish sidewalks, sourcing the material from the site as well as Copenhagen’s municipal reuse facility. Vertically rotated, the slabs are unrecognizable as old pavers. BOGL cofounder Jens Linnet says that the prototype helped win over community members who were initially skeptical of the proposal. The desire to use a bright steel tube fence…

JONATHAN HALLET, ASLA Owner and Principal, Supernature, Seattle MERTON BORDERS AT THE OXFORD BOTANIC GARDEN Oxford, England James Hitchmough This garden is fully designed but was established by seed, so the density and intermingling of plants do something that gardens planted from pots can’t do. There’s a natural, wild quality even as the planting design is stunning—it feels hypernatural. VILLA LANTE Bagnaia, Italy Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola Villa Lante showed me how gardens can tell stories in a seamless way—you live the story as you move through it. Water is its main story vehicle, moving between terraces from a trickling grotto, patterning and surging, and ending in “civilized” reflecting pools. BLOEDEL RESERVE Bainbridge Island, Washington Thomas Church, Fujitaro Kubota, Richard Haag, Koichi Kawana, and Iain Robertson I grew up visiting…

A little over a year ago, the city of Fort Worth became Texas’s fourth-largest city, having added more than 70,000 new residents in four years. To the city’s mayor, Mattie Parker, that growth represents opportunity and a major challenge. “We lose about 50 acres of natural open space to development per week,” Parker says. In response, the mayor has made the conservation of open space a pillar of her administration. In 2023, she launched Good Natured, a citywide green space initiative that will conserve 10,000 acres of open space by 2028 while increasing access to parks, protecting Fort Worth’s water supply, and supporting public environmental education. The ambitious and landscape-centric nature of the initiative caught the attention of local landscape architect Allison Docker, ASLA, who reached out to her local…