Professional Awards Categories
Built – Commercial Landscape Design
Recognising outstanding landscape architecture projects within commercial developments, including mixed-use precincts, retail spaces, office environments, and interior landscapes.
Built – Hospitality & Tourism
The Hospitality category seeks to honour exceptional landscape architecture in hotels, restaurants, resorts, lodges, retreats, wellness centres, tourist attractions, wineries, agrotourism attractions, cultural centres and theme parks.
Built – Institutional/Campus
Projects in this category should enhance learning environments, support well-being, and create inspiring public spaces. Whether a city halls, libraries, museum, art gallery, courts, hospital, universities, schools, education facilities, community facilities, places of worship, city botanic gardens, or other government or civic facilities.
Built – Large Public Space
Celebrating large-scale public spaces greater than 2,000m2/21,500 sq.ft. These projects (that are accessible to the public) can include parks, gardens, plazas, piers, amphitheatres, squares, campuses, arboretums, wetlands, and shared streets.
Built – Small Public Space
Recognising the importance of small-scale design projects (less than 2,000m2/21,500 sq ft). These projects (that are accessible to the public) can include pocket parks, parklets, public rooftops, art installations, playgrounds, experimental and demonstration gardens, and show gardens
Built – Commercial Residential Landscape
Projects that include multi-dwelling residential designs, including low-, medium-, or high-rise developments, for residential or mixed-use development (including residential). Entries for the Commercial Residential Design category include show houses, townhouse developments, apartment/condo buildings, multiple high rises, community developments, and other multi-dwelling projects.
Built – Private Residential Landscape
This category seeks to recognise single-dwelling residential landscape designs of varying scales, from small to large projects. These projects can include a rooftop garden, balcony garden, private home garden, estate garden, ranch, or homestead garden for a single dwelling.
Built – Masterplanning & Urban Design
Masterplanning and Urban Design are crucial to shaping our urban environments, cities, and towns. Entries can include built work originating from master plans, frameworks, major transit hubs, ecological/green/blue networks, urban regeneration, waterfronts, and river corridors.
Built – Sustainability & Resilience
Seeks to recognise innovative projects that address pressing environmental challenges through sustainable design and resilient strategies. Projects should seek to mitigate or adapt to climate change, enhance ecological health, and promote long-term community and environmental well-being.
Concept – Private Space
This category showcases the potential of conceptual and unbuilt private spaces in combining aesthetics, sustainability, and functionality. Submissions may include hotels, resorts, offices (high rise and campus), mixed use, private gardens, private tourism (theme parks, reserves, marinas), universities, schools, education facilties, health (hospitals, aged care,) airports, mixed use developments, renewable energy installations, water treatment, waste to energy facilities, agricultural & forestry sites (farms, private forest), industrial sites (factories, logistics hubs, ports,).
Concept – Public Space
Seeks to acknowledge the visionary, conceptual and unbuilt projects exploring innovative public space design approaches. Projects may include parks, plazas, squares, streets, esplanades, memorials, playgrounds, outdoor theatres, botanical gardens, therapeutic gardens, cutural institutions, seasonal installations, public art spaces or urban interventions, public spaces for cultural gatherings, festivals, or performances, town halls, memorials, monuments, green infrastructure concepts, eco-parks or natural reserves, climate parks, waterfronts, promenades, riverfronts, beaches, public transit stations.
Concept – Analysis & Planning
Designers often spend considerable time and effort developing documents that include significant analysis and planning for future landscapes. This category can include planning documents, master plans, post-occupancy reports, design manuals, guidelines, management plans, frameworks, planning overlays, policies, regulations, and other landscape evaluation reports.
Concept – Residential Landscape Design
Residential landscape design is vital in creating the first place where people often experience landscape and nature. This category aims to honour conceptual design for single- and multi-dwelling residential buildings (private and commercial). Entries in this category can include concepts for single houses, apartments/condos, townhouses, homesteads, ranches, and multiple residential developments.
Concept – Masterplanning & Urban Design
Projects can incorporate new, visionary approaches, ideas, and processes in design due to their scale and their ability to shape the future of cities and landscapes. Entries can include conceptual design for masterplans, frameworks, precinct plans, urban renewal plans, greenways, shared streets, community gardens, post-industrial landscapes, green infrastructure plans, park networks, ecological belts, neighbourhood redevelopments or districts, eco-city plans, resiliency plans, biodiversity networks, flood resilient urban design, waterfronts, urban design manuals, and design guidelines.
World Landscape Architecture – Editor’s Award
Selected by Damian Holmes, Editor of World Landscape Architecture, to represent the best project not selected by the jury for a WLA Award that he feels deserves recognition and promotes landscape architecture and addresses the current issues facing the world.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) Awards
These Cultural Landscape Awards, in partnership with The Cultural Landscape Foundation, recognise the holistic planning, design, and stewardship efforts that reveal and assign value to a landscape’s palimpsest – embracing historic and cultural assets and systems in the same way that traditional practice addresses dynamic natural and ecological systems.
Cultural Landscape – Design Excellence & Innovation
The Design Excellence & Innovation category recognises achievements in transforming cultural landscapes. This award celebrates projects that showcase creativity and innovation and highlight historical significance through various design interventions.
Cultural Landscape – Planning & Research
The Planning & Research category honours innovative work in investigating, documenting, analysing, and proposing design and management strategies. Landscape architects must demonstrate how they conducted research and comprehensive planning for culturally significant landscapes, and how this research shaped design and management proposals.
Student Awards Categories
Concept Design
A design developed during a design studio or competition that best showcases the student’s work and contributes to the improvement of the environment, community or profession.
Graduate
Conceptual or Built Work that was developed during a design studio, competition, or research that best showcases the graduate student’s work and expands upon past research or studio work.
University Studio
University Studio Award – A design or technical studio that explores new ideas and contributes to the profession by improving and/or addressing environmental, social, and economic issues.
The WLA Editor or Award Jurors may change an entry’s category if it better suits another category.