Brisbane’s own Fish Lane has won the Urban Design Landscape Architecture Award at the 2018 National Landscape Architecture Awards, presented by The Australian Institue of Landscape Architects (AILA). The awards recognised 38 winners across 14 categories, celebrating leading projects of all sizes across Australia’s regional and metropolitan areas.
Other winners included the Gold Coast’s HOTA Outdoor Stage and Noosa’s Maravista, which won the Tourism Landscape Architecture Award, while Palmwoods Town Square on the Sunshine Coast claimed the Community Contribution Landscape Architecture Award.
The annual awards program acknowledges how landscape architects are helping to shape cities and towns to tackle the major issues facing people from all walks of life, including an ageing population, climbing obesity and diabetes rates, transport challenges and the increasing importance of positive mental health.
AILA National Awards Jury Chair Sara Kjaersgaard says landscape architects are fundamental to the health and wellbeing of our communities, which is reflected through the awards. “The awarded projects are sensitive, thoughtful and ambitious responses to repairing and improving our Australian landscapes. This is of critical importance at a time of increasing urbanisation and climate change,” she said.
The awards coincided with the 2018 AILA International Festival of Landscape Architecture: The Expanding Field. The festival celebrated the great diversity within Landscape Architecture practice, promoting the critical role the profession has in confronting and contributing to the social and economic challenges of the coming century.
The Expanding Field Creative Directors, Taylor Cullity Lethlean (TCL), say the social and environmental challenges we face are large-scale and systemic, from climate change to growing wealth inequality and a politically volatile climate worldwide. Landscape architects are now, more than ever, expanding their skill set to help the world deal with these critical issues.
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