If you do, the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) wants to know, as it seeks submissions for its 16th annual Great Places awards. The organization is looking for work that “demonstrates how an understanding of the experience of place may be used to generate insightful design.” Winners have successfully combined “expertise in design, research, and practice” in a way that “contributes to the creation of dynamic, humane places that engage our attention and imagination.”
EDRA say great places are the result of an “interdisciplinary approach that is enduring, human-centered, sustainable, and concerned with the experiential relationship between people and their environment (built and natural) over time.”
The competition is really open to all: “Submissions are welcome from the full breadth of environmental design and related research activities, including architecture, landscape architecture, planning, urban design, interior design, lighting design, graphic design, place-based public art, environmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, and the physical sciences.”
There are four awards categories: place design, place planning, place research, and the Great Places Book Prize.
In past years, a number of well-known contemporary landscape architecture designs, plans, projects have won Great Places awards. Last year, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol’s National Mall design competition entry, Unified Ground, won an award. In 2012, Escuela Ecologica Saludable Initiative: Parque Primaria Pitagoras, an innovative research project from University of Washington landscape architecture professor Benjamin Spencer, won. In earlier years, The Steel Yard Park by Kloper Martin Design Group, which also won an ASLA Professional Design Award, was deemed a great place as well.
Submissions are due by February 3.
Another competition that may be of interest to landscape architects: the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) seeks entries for its 2014 ideas competition in Copenhagen. They invite “interdisciplinary teams from around the world to submit their ideas for what infrastructure art of sustainable cities looks like.” LAGI gives awards to the best ideas for “public art that provides utility-scale clean energy to the grid.” The top 50 submissions will be included in an exhibition and book.
Image credit: ASLA 2011 Professional General Design Honor Award. Steel Yard Park by Klopfer Martin Design Group / Annali Kiers
