The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has announced its 2025 Honours, recognising leading figures who are shaping the profession’s future across practice, academia, community engagement, and ecological stewardship. This year’s awards reflect a broadened disciplinary scope and a more urgent public mandate. 

Below is only a selection of the received honours; we congratulate all the awardees. 

ASLA Medal was received by Michael Van Valkenburgh, one of North America’s most influential landscape architects. Known for projects like Brooklyn Bridge Park and Allegheny Riverfront Park, his work fuses poetic form with infrastructural clarity. Founding MVVA in 1982, he has guided the firm through decades of award-winning public projects while teaching at Harvard GSD for over 30 years. Van Valkenburgh’s practice navigates between conceptual rigour and ecological responsiveness, often reworking the DNA of post-industrial landscapes.

Design Medal was received by Jeffrey Carbo, whose practice, rooted in the American South, blends cultural heritage with understated ecological design. Through the Jeffrey Carbo Landscape Architects studio, he has cultivated a body of work spanning memorials, civic spaces and gardens—balancing narrative with natural systems. Over the past three decades, his practice has received more than 100 regional and national awards. Carbo is recognised for his “quiet modernism,” where every intervention is tailored, enduring, and spatially generous.

Community Service Award – Organisation was given to Coastal Dynamics Design Lab, North Carolina State University. An applied research initiative embedded within the NC State College of Design, this lab has built an exemplary model for integrating academic research with coastal resilience planning. Led by Andy Fox, the Lab brings landscape architecture students and faculty into collaborative projects with municipalities and local communities across North Carolina’s vulnerable coastlines. Their work translates data and policy into visible, usable design—often piloting adaptive infrastructure in places where climate risks are already manifest.

Community Service Award – Individual was received by Matthew Potteiger, professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Potteiger is widely known for his work on food systems and the cultural ecologies of landscape. His book Eating Architecture (co-edited with Jamie Moore) helped establish a now-burgeoning discourse at the intersection of food, place, and urban form. Beyond scholarship, Potteiger has led community-engaged projects focused on land use, justice, and alternative agrarian practices, often positioning students as active agents in shaping public landscapes.

Landscape Architecture Firm Award was awarded to SCAPE. Under the leadership of Kate Orff, SCAPE has emerged as one of the most influential firms practicing today. Known for projects that rethink the relationship between landscape and infrastructure, SCAPE’s work is both deeply research-based and provocatively visual. From Living Breakwaters in Staten Island to the reimagining of the Gowanus Canal, their practice dissolves the boundaries between ecological restoration and public space. SCAPE consistently positions the landscape architect not as a stylist, but as a systems thinker, negotiator, and activist.