UVA School of Architecture is pleased to announce the winning entry and honorable mentions for the 2018 Richard Guy Wilson Prize for Excellence in the Study of Buildings, Landscapes and Places. The $5,000 annual prize – named in honor of Wilson, Commonwealth Professor of Architectural History, and supported by an endowment generously donated by Wilson’s former student, Mallory Walker – provides students, both undergraduate and graduate, with an opportunity to examine and reflect upon the value of place and the diverse ways through which we all contribute to the shaping of the environment. The prize encourages students from any discipline at UVA to participate; submissions include, but are not limited to, writing, design, poetry, painting, legal/business briefs, scholarly research and essays, film, and photography.

This year is the second year that the Prize has been awarded and 51 entries were received. The Prize has garnered extraordinary interest from all corners of the University and powerfully demonstrates the importance of the value of place, and our urgent need to bring forth imaginative ways to shape our environment. This year’s jury included Lisa Goff (Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, Director of Institute for Public History), Shiqiao Li (Weedon Professor in Asian Architecture, Chair of the Department of Architectural History), Ekaterina Makarova (Associate Professor of Sociology), Beth Meyer (Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture), Richard Schragger (Perre Bowen Professor of Law, Joseph C. Carter, Jr. Research Professor of Law), and Richard Guy Wilson (Commonwealth Professor of Architectural History).

This year’s winning entry was awarded to Landscape Architecture graduate students, Madelyn Hoagland-Hanson, Sarah Pate, and Ru Wu for their submission, Turn Park. The faculty judges praised the entry’s thoughtful, sensitive, imaginative, and rigorous design response to the land-building and management strategies of the Meadowlands of New Jersey. The judges found the research developed to be relevant and strong, the design and presentation elegant and innovative, and the narratives compelling. The proposal, while carefully considered in relationship to its site of the Meadowlands, inspired critical thought far beyond its particular location of study.

Turn Park – as articulated by the award recipients – “is a response to recent speculations that the Meadowlands of New Jersey might become America’s first National Park for climate resilience.”

Turn Park is situated at the unfamiliar intersection of 21st century ecological concerns, 20th century infrastructure, and 19th century theories of nature and aesthetics. The design proposal pairs a large-scale, eighty-year plan for building and managing the region’s extensive salt marshes with designs for a series of Olmstedian gardens organized around the armature of the western spur of the New Jersey turnpike, the long-term viability of which is threatened by sea level rise.

Hoagland-Hanson, Pate, and Wu’s proposal includes a Park Manifesto that envisions the Meadowlands’ future as both “forward-looking and historically conscious. The design ‘turns’ on the fertile tension between nature and technology, domestic and wild, the past and future American landscapes.”

Two sublime forms meet in the Meadowlands.

One, the New Jersey Turnpike: an icon of post-war Human Progress, an engineering marvel, suburban sine qua non, shining symbol of the capitalist capacity of Man to master Nature.

The other, the Meadows themselves: vast, wet, reedy, and lonely, echoing with the buried excesses of generations of New York glitz, an icon of Anti-Progress, the things we wish we could forget.

As the world warms and the sea rises, fictions of separateness become harder and harder to maintain. The straight, unerring line between land and sea, infrastructure and wilderness, human and non-, sublime and beautiful, quotidian and strange, machine and garden, past and future, is muddled.

Turn Park is a place to encounter apparent boundaries and find that they were never there. A series of strange gardens in the midst of a machinic wilderness, it is a park “where democracy can look back upon itself,” and forward again, and back again—forever spiraling like an interchange, or the inner folds of a rose.

The faculty advisors for the submission are Alex Wall and Leena Cho, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture.