Adele Ashkar isn’t your typical landscape architect. Her career path has taken her from working full time at a practice to becoming a respected educator to designing pro bono public projects. Through it all, she carried with her a passion for design and a dedication to sustainability that was recognized at last weekend’s ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO where she was elevated to ASLA’s Council of Fellows.
Starting out as a landscape architect at the global design firm HOK, Ashkar soon found it difficult to balance her professional aspirations and her growing family. Her temporary solution to this challenge ended up shifting her career path.
“I ended up in education almost by mistake,” says Ashkar. “I was drawn into teaching as a part-time job while I was raising a family. I thought I would just do it for a bit to keep active professionally, but it turned out to be incredibly rewarding, and so eventually I became an academic full time at George Washington University (GW).”
Ashkar discusses students’ landscape designs with her class.
And in an ironic turn of events, Ashkar’s shift in her career has led her into teaching nontraditional students who are often making a big change in their professional lives, as well. “Teaching adult students is both a challenge and a joy. Whether they’re seeking to enhance their skill set for their current jobs or transition to entirely new ones, they’re all highly committed and very excited about making a change. And these nontraditional students become nontraditional employees, adding a whole new demographic with new perspectives to the landscape industry.”
Training the next generation of landscape designers isn’t the only way Ashkar contributes to the industry, as her move into the field of education brought opportunities outside the realm of teaching. When she joined the faculty at George Washington, Ashkar was one of the first landscape professionals on staff. With the support of a new university president who is interested in sustainability, she’s impacted both the school’s campus and the community.
Ashkar’s planning document for the university’s GroW Community Garden
“When GW President Steven Knapp first brought up the topic of sustainability, he was speaking more along the lines of energy conservation and carbon sequestration, rather than ecological resilience,” says Ashkar. “But his initial push allowed my ideas to blossom about the importance of landscape architecture and stewardship of the land, which was something completely new to the university.” Under Ashkar’s guidance as the director of the Sustainable Landscapes program, GW has taken on many new sustainable projects, including one of the pilot projects for the SITES program. “We took a parking lot on a city block and turned it into a park with stormwater harvesting, pervious paving, and native plants; it was both great for the community and a great way to help my students understand why those things are important concepts in design.”
Such projects are the norm for Ashkar, who routinely partners with other faculty members and groups of students to work on pro bono projects centered on sustainability, reflecting her belief that sustainability needs to be a grassroots movement in order to change the world.
GW’s SITES landscape
“For our society to become more sustainable, it has to happen from the bottom up,” Ashkar says. “We have to spread the word among students at the university, as well as educate the people at home about how sustainability affects them. We can’t keep expecting the government and big industries to make changes if we won’t.”
To that point, Ashkar believes that the future of landscape architecture is in understanding ecology. “The term sustainability is already becoming a buzzword and losing meaning,” she says. “Learning about native plants as ecological communities and understanding how plants function together to support the environment is at the core of creating sustainable landscapes.” And with its extensive plant database and worksheet tools that allow for in-depth rainwater analyses, Ashkar sees Vectorworks Landmark software as a tool that helps to further her dreams for the industry. “I like the software a lot, and we’ve begun teaching it to our students. We’ve even started moving toward making it a requirement for landscape design students to learn. Everyone who has taken classes on it so far has said, ‘oh my gosh, I wish I’d learned this years ago.’”
Congratulations to Ashkar on her elevation to FASLA. If you couldn’t be there to meet this year’s fellows for yourself, be sure to check out our profiles on the incredible work of other Vectorworks users also elevated last weekend, Mary Bates and Chip Trageser.
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