Connectedness and community: 2020 Landscape Student Prize

The work being produced in Australias landscape architecture schools is at the forefront of pushing boundaries and making new connections in the discipline, but much of it does not transcend faculty walls to be seen by a wider community. The Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize identifies and shares the finest graduating projects produced in landscape architecture education across the country. Australian universities each nominate a student based on their end-of-year presentation. The projects are then blindly reviewed by an independent jury, which awards one student the national prize.

Jury comment

This year’s selection of winning projects spotlights issues of contemporary practice – projects include a strategy for a rural Queensland town that offers a transformative model for agriculture through the intertwining of modern food technology and Indigenous knowledge; a series of design interventions that highlight the dynamic systems and geomorphology of the Sydney Basin; and a scheme that harnesses the natural processes of tidal river flats to address sea level rise impacts along Adelaide’s Port River.

The jury is pleased to announce Farewell Ex-Neighbourhood by Pohan Chu of The University of Melbourne as this year’s national winner. The project deserves recognition for tackling an often challenging urban typology – the integration of outdoor community space in medium-density suburban areas. The proposal further investigates the potential of these interstitial spaces to offer places for “spatial distancing” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The scheme presents a highly resolved and legible proposal that demonstrates rigorous design thinking at a variety of scales. Precise drawings detail and support the project’s proposition – the creation of a vibrant, walkable neighbourhood where communal open spaces benefit from the adjacency of retail and commercial uses, the integration of passively irrigated gardens and the provision of flexible gathering spaces that can be configured to offer varying degrees of privacy or openness, depending on the situation and needs. Farewell Ex-Neighbourhood engages with the growing realization of the importance of connectedness and community to our mental and physical wellbeing, and the power of landscape to remind us we are all in this together.

National Prize winner

Farewell Ex-Neighbourhood Pohan Chu, The University of Melbourne

Prize winners

Living with sea rise: Barwon Estuary Design FrameworkRudan Fan, Deakin University

Interconnected Intensities – Patrick Fitz-Hayes, University of Technology Sydney

Enclaves and Field ConservationTom Flugge, RMIT University

Fremantle Waterfront, Western AustraliaSasha Spasic, The University of Western Australia

Food 4.0Julia McCann, Queensland University of Technology

The Shape of FlowYu Lin, The University of Adelaide

A Healthy Landscape for CanberraBrooke Toovey, The University of Canberra

The 2020 Landscape Student Prize comprised Peta-Maree Ashford (vice president, Australian Institute of Landscape Architects), Sue Barnsley (principal, Sue Barnsley Design) and Emily Wong (editor, Landscape Architecture Australia).

The 2020 Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize is presented by Landscape Architecture Australia magazine and LandscapeAustralia.com and supported by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects through the provision of a complimentary AILA graduate membership for the National Prize winner.

Source

News

Published online: 15 Feb 2021
Words: LandscapeAustralia Editorial Desk
Images: Pohan Chu

Issue

Landscape Architecture Australia, February 2021

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