ASLA Design Winners 2006 (GardenDesignOnline)

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The latest in landscape design is modern and trendy, traditional with a twist, bold and dramatic. The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has announced its 2006 design awards, and most are very 21st century. Landworks Studio Inc. of Salem, MA won a general design award of excellence for the garden courtyard (left) at the Court Square Press Building in Boston. A wood and aluminum pathway zigzags through a bamboo forest, and light boxes and oversized benches create various gathering spaces which at night is reminiscent of a campfire experience.

The design is organized around fragmented views, and on upper levels of the building, steel cables and a web of yellow fiber optic lines will cast colored light into the bamboo canopy. As the jury put it, it's "Wonderful, playful, original, and will only get better with time."

In the residential category, the top award of excellence went to Steve Martino & Associates of Phoenix, AZ, for a "welcoming space... sustainability in residential design," and innovative use of "native plants and shade trees." Martino completely transformed a 40-year-old house with a 4300 square foot asphalt parking area and a drive-through carport into a house and garden at one with each other. The house now embraces the surrounding desert landscape; covered terraces cooled by ceiling fans provide seamless transition between indoors and outdoors; native plantings were used throughout, and non-native hedges and trees were removed to open the views to mountains in the distance. A concrete wall fountain on the dining terrace obscures the sound of traffic on a nearby road, and glass pocket doors can be opened or shut to physically separate the house from the garden.

(Court Sq. image courtesy of Landworks Studio, Inc.; Desert house, photos by Steve Martino, FASLA)

There are many more exciting projects among these awards, but I particularly liked two of the residential design awards of honor. A Greenwich, CT residence by Stephen Stimson Associates of Falmouth, MA, is both traditional and modern, and reflects the client's interest in the work of the late landscape architect Dan Kiley. The design is based on formal arrangements of space based on right angles or perpendiculars, and it uses traditional materials and plantings of the region: bluestone walkways, fieldstone retaining walls, blueberries, hollies, red maples, redbuds, birches. It is simple and elegant with exciting restraint.

Finally, you have to admire the masterful ingenuity of Marmol Radziner and Assoc iates of Los Angeles that went into this 975 square foot space in Venice, CA. A garden courtyard links four apartment units and a garage, with cascading terraces, soft plantings that tolerate a lot of shade, yet require only minimal irrigation. It's clean, it's bold, it's cozy and soothing -- everything anyone would want in a garden.