2022 Resene New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architecture Awards
Thursday night will see the 2022 Resene New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architecture Awards presented at a gala dinner at the Cordis Hotel in Auckland, the culmination of a week of celebration as the 50th anniversary of the Institute is marked at the 2022 Firth NZILA Conference, also at the Cordis Hotel.
Dr Jacky Bowring is the chair of this year’s judging panel and says the standard of this year’s winners and entries is extremely high. “We had a couple of situations where we ended up with joint winners in categories,” she says.
“I think that speaks really loudly about the health of the profession at the moment in terms of the the quality of work that we are seeing.”
The shortlist was announced in March and featured here on LAA and since then the judging panel undertook a road trip, visiting all the built projects before making the final decisions.
The Judges hit the road and were in Tāmaki Makaurau in May.
“We had this amazing opportunity to travel to these sites and experience them first hand,” says Jacky. “We were really impressed with what we saw. There are a lot of very positive things coming through, both in the submission documents and and the sites themselves, about the quality of the design work, the quality of the implementation of these projects.”
And she says the elevation of the te ao Māori component in this year’s entries is evident and important. Jacky says this has been evolving over recent years and is now “the common denominator across nearly all of the winning projects.”
She also says in the past, Aotearoa’s geographical isolation has been seen as perhaps a limitation in terms of design, but that’s changing.
“We've maybe seen ourselves as being a bit isolated from the rest of the world, but there's some things that make that a positive now in terms of just everyday living. If we think about things like COVID, our isolation was a benefit in that sense but it also means that we have some very special things here.”
But, says Jacky, that comes with a warning. “We have to be really careful that we don't become complacent or indifferent. We have to remember that stewardship, that kaitiaki is really core to what we do to care for the landscape. That that needs to stay at the forefront.”
You can see more from Jacky in the video below.
