Merit Awards

SWA Group
Planning and Analysis

The Arabian Canal invites residents and visitors to energetically live with water, in all its forms; water that refreshes, sustains and engages. The Arabian Canal welcomes life. Micro climate modification, the use of xeriscape landscape, water conservation methods and the creation of walk-able cityscape all work together to create a sustainable project.

The Office of James Burnett
Design - Constructed - Public

Conceived as a landmark destination for Rice University’s campus, the Raymond and Susan Brochstein Pavilion demonstrates the ability of landscape architecture to foster social interaction and improve the human condition. A study in restraint and the purity of form, the garden at the Brochstein Pavilion creates a powerful spatial framework that has transformed an unstructured, underutilized quadrangle into the center of student activity on campus.

Parkhill Smith & Cooper
Planning and Analysis

The Laredo Parks and Open Space Master Plan is a bold move for the rapidly expanding city of Laredo, Texas. With growth of 25% since 2000 and projected growth double the rate of the State of Texas until 2015 the City has struggled to acquire and develop park and open space lands in newly-developed areas of the City. The new plan utilized GIS technology to identify new park sites and open space corridors within the City and its ETJ. With added input of citizens, sports leagues and elected officials, goals and objectives were assimilated into the plan to optimize the opportunities for quality of life improvements. This plan is the first Parks and Open Space Master Plan to be recognized and adopted by the City of Laredo Planning and Zoning Commission and will hopefully establish a new basis for integrated planning, dedication and acquisition of parks and open space for the citizens of Laredo.

The Office of James Burnett
Design - Constructed - Residential

This residence in the beach town of Del Mar, California, was designed in close collaboration with the architect and the owner. A second home for the owner, the residence expresses the owner’s personality and builds upon the storied tradition of southern California living.

Asakura Robinson Company, LLC
Design - Constructed - Residential

The Inverness Residence realized the vision of a landscape design that interacts and compliments the architecture of the home to emphasis the minimal expression of Modernism. Built on a confined site, the design focused on refined details, movement of space, relationship within the framework of the building and capturing the essence of the neighborhood. Carefully selected plant materials provided privacy, minimal irrigation and minimal maintenance. The creative incorporation of two tiered roof gardens provides the homeowner with a serenely private retreat from the rest of the residence.

Hocker Design Group
Design - Constructed - Residential

This small entry garden creates a platform for displaying native plants. The planters and wall were designed to create house centric garden views from the inside out, while still creating a sense of privacy. Horizontal concrete bands lead from a small grass paver plinth. The elevated steel planters rise up from a pristine verdant carpet of turf. The sculptural steel planters are filled with monocultural plantings of texas sage, prickly pear, and gulf muhly grass.

As you enter the courtyard, a small fountain creates a soothing sound. A stucco wall intersects a steel planter creating an architectural extension of the house. A galvanized pipe extends out from the wall spilling into the concrete trough below. The garden’s native plantings are low water use, and low maintenace.

Mesa
Design - Unrealized - Commercial

The client, an asset management group in Dubai, commissioned the landscape architect to collaborate with the architect and developer on their headquarters building located at a marina along the base of the Palm Islands land reclamation and development project in the Persian Gulf. The landscape architect’s challenge was to examine ways in which these headquarters could become a place to link activities at the water and marina with a nearby highway, bridge, and surrounding park land. Although the project setting is at a manmade island, the landscape architect’s design solutions made reference to the naturally occurring islands in nearby Abu Dhabi with their mangroves and native plants. The design attempted to abstract the patterns of nature—water flow, wildlife, fisheries, and refuge—and apply them to a manmade place.

Jimmie L. King, PhD
Planning and Analysis

A Regional Development Plan embraces the issue of sustainability based upon an integrated planning model which simultaneously incorporates ecological integrity + social equality + economic prosperity as fundamental constructs. The plan deals with a wide variety of design issues which range from the regional (development) to local scale (design), considering each community and natural space within the region as part of a larger integrated whole.

The project, funded from a federal grant from CONACYT, was well received by the Governor of Nuevo Leon as well as state planning officials and has been legally adoption by the State Legislature.

The plan was the first of its kind in Mexico and has been adopted as a methodological prototype in Mexico and with a great deal of pride, was produced by a Landscape Architect.

Jacobs
Design - Unrealized - Public

Once a year, Texas A&M University celebrates a special day called “Muster” where faculty, students, and former graduates stop at a designated time, wherever they may be, to observe a moment of silence to remember those former graduates, friends, and faculty who have passed on. This is often done on campus in large group gatherings.

From this tradition, the University desired a special place where alumni, former faculty, students and their families could be interred close to campus, with the resulting burial place serving as a memorial and gathering place for Muster. The cemetery was envisioned as a perpetual landscape of quiet beauty and serenity - beckoning the living as well as providing repose for the dead; a place for remembering those former alumni, students and faculty who have graduated from this life into the next. This special place is called “The Aggie Field of Honor.”

J. Robert Anderson Landscape Architects
Design - Constructed - Commercial

The Shops at La Cantera is an original concept retail center located in the heart of a 1,700 acre master planned resort community in San Antonio, Texas. The landscape architect’s concept was to bring the diverse natural beauty of the Hill Country into the project through a series of garden spaces, based on the cultural and ecological zones of San Antonio and Central Texas. Interconnected by natural water features and decorative paving patterns, these spaces combine the soothing sensory experience of a garden with the spatial character and vibrant human activity of an urban streetscape. The architecture reaches into the landscape, framing and interacting with the space between the buildings, but it is the landscape itself—composed of water, stone, motion, and life—that makes La Cantera such a memorable place.

Mesa
Communications

The landscape architect was hired by the design architect to prepare a site analysis for the new Tyler Museum of Art. The Tyler Site Study is an interactive site analysis presented in a recycled paper box, assembled by hand, and intended to facilitate a deeper understanding of the research, analysis, and design issues that a sustainable site development entails. The challenge here is the landscape architect’s method of information delivery to a sophisticated Museum Board accustomed to viewing high-end publications and works of art. A series of fifteen map-covered boxes form a larger map when placed in proper sequence demonstrating the interplay of micro and macro scales and a systems-thinking approach.