ASLA Oregon has announced its 2016 Honor Awards winners and we are thrilled to be recognized with the Outstanding Firm Award for major contributions to the profession. The awards, which celebrate the spirit of the landscape architecture profession in Oregon, honor people and organizations for their service, design excellence, community leadership and stewardship. We look forward to celebrating with our friends and colleagues during Oregon ASLA’s Annual Soiree on Friday, November 4, 2016.
Michael Reed Receives Highest Honor from Society for Experiential Graphic Design
Michael Reed, Mayer/Reed’s founding principal, was named SEGD Fellow during a June 11 event at the 2016 SEGD Conference in Seattle. Michael accepted the award with a presentation about his career path entitled, “Object, Symbol, Message: A Journey of Discovery & Search for Meaning.”
The SEGD Fellow award recognizes a designer for promoting the highest values in experiential graphic design and significantly contributing to the direction and growth of the field. Michael joins the ranks of just 37 others, including Massimo Vignelli, Lance Wyman, Wayne Hunt, Sue Gould, David Gibson, Donald Meeker and Henry Beer.
In a follow-up SEGD article celebrating Michael’s career, he reflects on his legacy, “I have always wanted to design beautiful things, but learned that for this activity to be meaningful it had to move beyond arbitrariness. A client doesn’t ask you to design a beautiful thing. They ask you to solve a problem. They trust you to design something of beauty. Maybe my legacy is instilling in our staff that, if you are given this privilege and trust, you have the obligation to do the right thing. You have to do things that contribute and add value.”
“Revolution in the Landscape” Receives SEGD Merit Award
The Society for Experiential Design (SEGD) honored a collaboration of 7 design teams for Revolution in the Landscape: Re-experience the Halprin Fountains, a two-hour long 2014 Design Week Portland event. The 2016 Merit Award in the public installations category was presented at the 2016 SEGD Conference in Seattle. The designers, led by SEGD Portland Chapter, created temporary installations along the Portland Open Space Sequence, designed by Lawrence Halprin and built between 1966 and 1970.
“Sometimes we forget what we have until someone shines a light on it. More of this kind of collaboration, please!” Juror comment
Project collaborators include: Mayer/Reed, Portland State University Graphic Design Department, Sticky Co, PNCA Animation Arts, Second Story, Stefan Lesueur, and Gamut Arts & Third Angle New Music. In total, 11 Honor Awards and 28 Merit Awards were chosen from among 371 submissions of experiential graphic design projects from around the world.
MAX Orange Line East Segment Receives Highest Award from ASLA Oregon
Recognized for setting a new national model for light rail line design, the MAX Orange Line East Segment garnered the ASLA Oregon Chapter 2015 Design Awards top honor, the Award of Excellence. For this transportation infrastructure project, the jury appreciated the role of the landscape architects and a design approach that created a series of human-scaled spaces that weave into the communities. Mayer/Reed, Inc. and GreenWorks, PC, the two firms providing urban design and landscape architecture respectively, submitted the project jointly. ESA Vigil Agrimis provided wetlands and creek restoration on the project.
The Orange Line East Segment also received the People’s Choice Award, as selected by attendees of the awards ceremony held on October 23 at the Multnomah Athletic Club in Portland.
“The Award of Excellence was recognition that the jury considered deliberately. The criteria for this honor was established by the panel early in our discussions and adhered to strictly throughout the day. We established that the project should demonstrate the potential to have a profound and widespread impact, one that defines a cultural moment while setting a new standard. We believe the Max Orange Line project truly exhibits this potential—congratulations to this exceptional team and their exceptional effort.” Juror, Valerie Yaw, a principal at Bluegreen