Congratulations to John Whitaker for winning the 2020 National ASLA Award of Excellence for his MLA thesis project, ‘Dark Matter’. Only a single project is selected each year for the prestigious award, among hundreds of international submissions. The juried landscape architecture awards honor the best and most innovative projects from around the globe and gives a glimpse into the future of the profession.

The 2020 Awards Jury provided the following remarks on John’s thesis:

“In the U.S., cemeteries were the first public parks, so it is perhaps a fitting turn that a cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, that was once converted to a public park may now become a cemetery again. The idea of celebrating decay in lieu of life may be a foreign one to some, yet practices of burial or cremation might seem equally absurd in the context of global resource shortages, pandemics, and climate change. Ash trunks harvested from around the city dot a new landscape for diverse iterations of grief where the organic reduction of bodies into compost cultivates new life from the dead. The cemetery becomes an evolving terrain as opposed to static markers in a field.”

For more information about the project, visit the 2020 ASLA Student Awards website:

https://www.asla.org/2020studentawards/1775.html

For more information on John, click on the ‘STUDIO’ tab at the top of the page.