Landscape Architecture

Efforts by UO researchers to study how climate change may change Pacific Northwest grasslands have blossomed into global collaborations with two recently published reports and a third on the way. Department of Landscape Architecture Professor Bart Johnson is one of the UO researchers collaborating in the effort. The three studies focus on the ability of soils to store excess carbon in the face of warming conditions. Studies at individual research sites have produced mixed results, but the new findings may help to change the scientific understanding.

Several A&AA scholars, alumni, and friends were recognized recently with Oregon Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects’ inaugural Honor Awards.

"After a long tradition of an annual design awards program, we decided to shift our focus this year to recognizing the best in our profession and our community," said Laurie Matthews, Oregon ASLA president.

A team of UO landscape architecture students won the People’s Choice award in the 2016 Biomimicry Global Design Challenge, along with a separate $10,000 cash prize, for their project “Living Filtration System.” The People’s Choice award included $3,000 plus software valued at another $3,000.

A&AA Dean Christoph Lindner moved from The Netherlands to Eugene in summer 2016 partly due to a program established at the UO. 

“One reason I uprooted my life from Amsterdam and came to Eugene included the Sustainable Cities Initiative,” Lindner told a crowd gathered in the Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes to kick off the SCI’s 2016–17 collaboration with the City of Albany, Oregon.

Competing against professional design firms, a UO student team placed second in the international Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) competition to design a civic artwork that also generates carbon-free electricity and water.

The award for their project, “Cetacea,” was presented Thursday, October 6, at the Greenbuild conference in Los Angeles, California. Smithsonian.com featured the project Oct. 5.

A&AA welcomes these new tenure-track faculty members for the 2016–17 academic year.

Findings by UO researchers including Gwynne Mhuireach, a doctoral student in landscape architecture at the UO, and landscape architecture Professor Bart Johnson are featured in the August 2 edition of Phys.org and will appear in print in the journal Science of the Total Environment. The researchers determined that airborne bacterial communities differ in subtle but potentially important ways. “I am looking for mechanisms that explain why vegetation helps people and how we can design for it,” Mhuireach says.

A team of UO landscape architecture students has won additional startup funding for a water filtration prototype, this time $2,500 in the statewide Portland State University Cleantech Challenge and a chance at winning another $10,000 in September. Earlier, the team won $10,000 in a global competition and the chance to compete for a $100,000 prize to be awarded in October. In a further show of team unity and largesse, one team member plans to use a separate, individual $15,000 scholarship stipend to further her team’s research.

Bart Johnson, head and professor of landscape architecture, is one of fifteen UO faculty chosen for a 2016-17 Fund for Faculty Excellence award.

The University of Oregon’s Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP) will be working once again in the Willamette Valley, this time in partnership with the City of Albany.

The City and the University of Oregon are planning twenty different projects for the 2016-17 academic year ranging from economic development to parks and recreation planning. Beginning in September, students from more than ten disciplines at the UO will work closely with the Albany community over the next year.