VectorWorks Users Reed Hilderbrand, PWP Landscape Architecture, and MFLA Marta Fry Landscape Associates Win ASLA 2007 Professional Awards
Columbia, Maryland (June 6, 2007)—– Nemetschek North America congratulates several VectorWorks users for winning ASLA 2007 Professional Awards.
Massachusetts firm Reed Hilderbrand won the Award of Excellence in the General Design Category for the M. Victor and Frances Leventritt Garden at The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. This garden realizes the Arnold Arboretum’s evolving scientific and public mission by bringing landscape architects together with research scientists to develop a flexible and engaging shrub and vine collection. Applying horticultural display traditions—bedding and terracing—to a 3.5-acre irregularly-shaped hillside, the project develops a contemporary, fully-accessible framework for changing collections emphases, educational programs, and daily enjoyment. By fusing the primary concerns of topography, plant culture and habit, spatial character, and interpretation, the project advances the collaborative legacy of Charles Sprague Sargent and Frederick Law Olmsted.
“Reed Hilderbrand has utilized VectorWorks' capabilities with increasing intensity over the last few years,” says Eric Kramer, an associate with Reed Hilderbrand. “The arboretum project was one of the first in our office to be completed using VectorWorks for construction documents. We now use the software in all aspects of design, from developing conceptual studies and site analysis through preparation of construction drawings and illustrative plans of built work."
PWP Landscape Architecture, based in Berkeley, California, won an Honor Award in the General Design Category for its One North Wacker Drive project. The design creates a useable landscape on the human scale, while solving the problems of a difficult site (a long, narrow strip between tall buildings with no depth for planting) at an artistic level that stands up to the overpowering context. The landscape for a fifty-two-story office tower in downtown Chicago is a forty-foot-wide protected linear way that runs for a block along the side of the building. This pedestrian passage—West Madison Street—creates a visual edge that can be seen through the parallel glazed wall of the building’s block-long lobby. It ends at the rear of the building on North Franklin Street, where a small square serves as an outdoor terrace for a street-level restaurant. The problem was to accommodate the tree planting and separate pedestrians from the street while humanizing the spaces and artistically dealing with the immense scale of the buildings.
San Francisco firm MFLA Marta Fry Landscape Associates received an Honor Award in the Residential Design Category for its Sonoma Vineyard project. Nestled at the base of Sonoma Mountain, this 160-acre site marks an eight-year collaboration of site evaluation, master planning, vineyard and orchard planting, ancillary structure development, and the most recent completion of the Main House. A strong agricultural vocabulary was developed, relying on the repetitious strength of patterned windrows, hedgerows, vineyards, and orchard grids. “Domestic landscapes” were developed as interventions within the greater agricultural landscape. The project represents an assemblage of buildings within a carefully modulated landscape, a modern villa framed in an agrarian setting.
“The MFLA Studio’s methodology is based on our understanding of landscape as framework and systems-based acts that enable the multiple functions and uses now required of our increasingly urban environment,” says firm principal Marta Fry. “Landscape architecture is uniquely positioned in the design world to inform critical inquiries as to what we should expect from public and private space at multiple scales, from fine-grained detailing and experiential environments to meta scales, and what sort of relationships we want to foster in the future. VectorWorks allows us to work seamlessly between these scales and disciplines and has proven to be a powerful tool to the Studio.”
For more detailed descriptions and images of the winning projects, please visit www.asla.org/awards/2007/07winners
Nemetschek North America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of European software giant Nemetschek AG. A global leader in design technologies, Nemetschek N.A. has been developing CAD software for the AEC, entertainment, landscape design, and manufacturing fields since 1985. VectorWorks, its flagship product, is one of the world's best-selling cross-platform CAD applications. An all-in-one solution that's easier to learn and use and more cost-effective than most other CAD programs, VectorWorks is ideal for firms that don't have unlimited IT budgets. For more information, visit www.nemetschek.net