Stoss Landscape Urbanism, the firm founded and led by Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Chris Reed (AB ’91), has earned a 2018 World Landscape Architecture (WLA) Award of Excellence for it project “Coastal Resilience Solutions for East Boston and Charlestown.” Developed in response to the City of Boston’s Climate Ready Boston report, the conceptual design offers both long and short-term strategies to protect vulnerable areas in East Boston and Charlestown from flooding.
In addition to Reed, who served as Design Director and Principal Landscape Architect on the project, the team included Amy Whitesides (MLA ’12), Project Co-Manager, Design and Engagement Lead; Alex Marchinski, Landscape Designer; and Difei Ma (MLA ’14), Landscape Designer. Entries to the annual competition were received from all over the world, organized by four categories, plus an editor’s pick. The nine winning projects (five Awards of Excellence and four Merit honorees) will be featured in the 2018 WLA Award Magazine.
Last month, Reed penned an opinion piece for the Boston Globe on the subject of climate readiness for the city of Boston, which referenced strategies outlined in “Coastal Resilience Solutions for East Boston and Charlestown.” He has also brought his interest in climate change in the context of urban sustainability to the GSD, leading a series of option studios on the subject (Re-Tooling Metropolis I, Re-Tooling Metropolis II), one of which resulted in the studio report, Retooling Metropolis: Working Landscapes, Emergent Urbanism. The report was named one of “25 Architecture and Design Books to Read This Fall” by Metropolis and one of the year’s “notable developments in landscape architecture” by the Huffington Post.
