The International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) has announced American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson as the winner of the 2019 Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award. The announcement was made at the 2019 World Congress currently underway in Oslo, Norway.
Inaugurated by IFLA in 2005, the annual Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award celebrates a living landscape architect whose “achievements and contributions have had a unique and lasting impact on the welfare of society and the environment and on the promotion of the profession of landscape architecture.” It is the highest honour the IFLA can bestow on a landscape architect. The award is named after notable British landscape architect Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, a founding president of IFLA, whose most well-known works included Cheddar Gorge and the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede in the UK.
Kathryn Gustafson graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure du Paysage de Versailles in France and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Among her significant projects are the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC completed in 2016; Cultuurpark Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam; the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in London, built in 2004; and The Lurie Garden at Chicago’s iconic Millenium Park, also completed in 2004.
Gustafson is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architecture, an honorary Royal Designer for Industry member and a medallist of the French Academy of Architecture. She received the ASLA Design Medal in 2008, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize for Architecture in 2012 and the 8th Obayashi Prize, Japan in 2014. In 2011, Kathryn and her Gustafson Guthrie Nicol (GGN) partners received the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture and in 2017, GGN was announced the winner of the ASLA 2017 National Landscape Architecture Firm Award.
With the announcement of the 2019 award, Gustafson joins American landscape architect and academic Anne Whiston Spirn, Dutch landscape architect and planner Dirk Sijmons, and German practitioner Peter Latz who were the most recent recipients of the award in 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively.
