The Quint Family Sensory Garden was UW Landscape Architecture’s most recent design-build project, led by professor Daniel Winterbottom. The Kline Galland Home provides skilled nursing and rehabilitation services. Over the course of two quarters, UWLA students worked to design and realize the sensory garden. The garden was opened in June 2024, and provides space to rest, explore through various senses, and even stimulate memory and reduce stress. For a more in-depth look at the Sensory Garden, and an insight into the support…
Category: Community Engagement
UW Earthlab Announces 2024-25 Innovation Grants Projects: JC3 and Collaborators Chosen for Feasibility Report in South Park for Biodigester
EarthLab has announced that five community-centered teams have been selected for the 2024-25 Innovation Grants program. The UW // LA department’s own Catherine De Almeida (Associate Professor) will be the Principal Investigator on one of the chosen teams, along with Graduate Student Assistant Sarah Chu (MLA ’25). Each team will receive $80,000 to research and develop new and actionable knowledge on community-driven projects at the intersection of climate change and social justice. To date, EarthLab has awarded nearly two million dollars in Innovation Grant funding to 29 transdisciplinary teams across five cohorts.
PAC Spring Lecture: Chelina Odbert
Join us on Wednesday, May 8th from 6:30-8p in Arch Hall 147!
Chelina Odbert, the co-founder and CEO of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), will explore her path from design school to the inception of a global, mission-driven planning and design practice. She believes in the power of community-engaged design to advance racial, environmental, and economic equity in neighborhoods and cities. Through a series of KDI projects, she will demonstrate how planning and design can and should be tools of equity, justice, and inclusion.
Just Circular Communities
Just Circular Communities (JCC) is an interdisciplinary collaborative that seeks to envision and implement localized, regenerative, and community-driven circular systems for a Just Transition – by, with, and for Frontline communities. At the University of Washington, College of Built Environments, students have engaged with JCC topics through Participatory Action Research and Service-Learning design studios. Led by Associate Professor Catherine De Almeida, landscape architecture, architecture, and urban planning students have participated in community-engaged design activities to explore the development of the…
Lid I-5 North to Host U District Community Vision Workshop
On Thursday, November 9th, the U District Partnership, the Lid I-5 campaign, and the UW Scan Design Master Studio will be hosting a community vision workshop focused on lidding Interstate 5 between NE 45th and NE 50th Streets. People of all walks of life are encouraged to come out and share their ideas for how they would like to see the area transformed by a freeway lid.
Camas ‘Baskets’ Installed in Burke Meadow
Urban environments pose a series of challenges to native habitat projects, such as heat from nearby hardscapes, trash and pollution, and disturbance from people visiting the site. The Burke Meadow project is no exception. One of the greatest challenges to the success of the meadow’s camas is grazing by feral urban rabbits, who often eat the shoots down to the ground in early spring.
InterAction Nepal | Spring 2023 | Bhangal Community Hall
During the spring quarter of 2023, the UW Department of Landscape Architecture sponsored the InterAction Nepal program in collaboration with the Kathmandu University Department of Development Studies. UW and Nepali students from multiple disciplines worked with community members from Bhangal, Budhanilkantha, an informal urban settlement in the Kathmandu Valley destroyed during Nepal’s 2015 earthquakes.
BLA Design-Build featured on the Arboretum Foundation Website
Our Woodland Creek Design Build is featured in this season’s Arboretum Foundation newsletter. The graduating class of BLAs did an amazing job renovating the former drainage pipe. To read more great details about the students’ work, check out this article from the Arboretum Foundation website.
Opening Reception: Sketching as Witness with Daniel Winterbottom
This exhibit features the sketches and watercolor works of Daniel Winterbottom from his neighborhood wanderings and observations of pandemic life: “deserted streets, businesses closing overnight, and a dramatic increase of homeless encampments.” Register and join us on February 24.
Just Urban Design
Newly released! “Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City” (MIT Press 2022) features a collection of chapters and case studies that apply a social justice lens to the design of urban environments.