Landscape Student Prize

Presenting the winners of the 2020 Landscape Student Prize.

Competition Overview

The work being produced in Australia’s landscape architecture schools is at the forefront of pushing boundaries and making new connections in our industry, but much of it does not transcend faculty walls to be seen by a wider community. The Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize identifies the finest graduating projects produced in landscape architecture education across the country. Australian universities each nominate a student based on their end-of-year presentation. These projects are reviewed by an independent jury, which awards one student the national prize.

Jury Comment

This year’s selection of winning projects spotlights issues of contemporary practice – projects include a strategy for a rural Queensland town that offers a transformative model for agriculture through the intertwining of modern food technology and Indigenous knowledge; a series of design interventions that highlight the dynamic systems and geomorphology of the Sydney Basin; and a scheme that harnesses the natural processes of tidal river flats to address sea level rise impacts along Adelaide’s Port River.

The jury is pleased to announce Farewell ExNeighbourhood by Pohan Chu of The University of Melbourne as this year’s national winner. The project deserves recognition for tackling an often challenging urban typology – the integration of outdoor community space in medium-density suburban areas. The proposal further investigates the potential of these interstitial spaces to offer places for “spatial distancing” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The scheme presents a highly resolved and legible proposal that demonstrates rigorous design thinking at a variety of scales. Precise drawings detail and support the project’s proposition – the creation of a vibrant, walkable neighbourhood where communal open spaces benefit from the adjacency of retail and commercial uses, the integration of passively irrigated gardens and the provision of flexible gathering spaces that can be configured to offer varying degrees of privacy or openness, depending on the situation and needs. Farewell Ex-Neighbourhood engages with the growing realization of the importance of connectedness and community to our mental and physical wellbeing, and the power of landscape to remind us we are all in this together.