The ASLA student Honor and Merit award program, administered through the ASLA chapters, is a collaborative effort between chapters and landscape architecture programs. The awards recognize academic achievement, design competence, and interpersonal skills, and are distributed to outstanding students in programs across the country.
The number of awards are based on the size of the academic program. At the University of Oregon, the faculty nominate two BLA students and two MLA students each year. Our nominees were recognized by the University of Oregon faculty as truly outstanding students for their scholarship, excellence in design, and service to the department. This recognition is worthy of honor and congratulations.
On Friday April 12, 2019, the Oregon Chapter of ASLA and the Department of Landscape Architecture convened a jury of ASLA members to hear 20-minute presentations from student nominees. After hearing the presentations, the jury deliberated their decision based on the following criteria:
Design Excellence
Outstanding Mentorship & Leadership
Potential for Future Professional Impact
We are pleased to announce the winners of this year’s awards. UO LA and ASLA Oregon will present the awards in person later this year at ASLA Oregon’s Annual Awards Soiree in Portland on November 1, 2019.
Emma Hershey, Undergraduate Honor Award
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Emma grew up multiracial, multilingual, and multicultural. She was raised within shared American and Chinese heritage, and the culture of a French bilingual school, so she learned quickly the value of diversity. Through landscape architecture she has evolved her passion for cultural vitality and social justice into an investigation of landscape tools in play, food, and art to resist gentrification. She plans to continue this pursuit through work in the urban public sector. When she’s not designing she’s playing every sport she can and still drawing people, plants, and places.
Summer Young, Undergraduate Merit Award
Summer is a recent graduate of the Bachelor of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Oregon. There she curated a series of experiences around community facilitation, creative and functional landscape design and practice of progressive environmental theory alongside landscape memory engagement. Summer volunteered in her ASLA Student Chapter as the BLA Outreach Coordinator before serving as President during her final year in the program. While outside the studio she mentored freshman, co-teaching a small class on global food history and worked at the Saturday Farmer’s Market in Eugene selling seedlings and sharing gardening tips. As of this last spring she was reconnecting to her home landscapes in Oregon, going on very long walks abroad and hoping to continue her work in landscape architecture and applied theory wherever she may end up in her pursuit of continued learning.
Sierra McCormas, Graduate Honor Award
Sierra is a master of landscape architecture student at the University of Oregon scheduled to graduate June 2019. She is from Crow, Oregon, and spends her free time gardening, hiking, camping and riding motorcycles. Her exposure to the beauty of the natural environment throughout her life growing up in Oregon is what drew her to landscape architecture. Her passions include urban agriculture and native ecological restoration within both the urban and rural contexts. She is motivated by the vision of a future where both people and ecological systems are healthy, diverse and productive.
Nick Sund, Graduate Merit Award
Nick is big-picture thinker and do-er known for his collaborative approach to design. His recent graduate research explores the convergence of autonomous transportation and community-led tactical urbanism, and demonstrates how suburban streets can become more than connectors between places, but places in themselves. Along with colleagues at the University of Oregon, Nick is also developing green sanitation infrastructure projects for low-income communities in Lima, Peru and Eugene, Oregon—finding ways to provide clean drinking water and basic sanitation for those who need it most. With a background in urban planning, he is passionate about building community and working with people to explore new ideas and ways to get things done.