Ellinikon Park – Honor Award in Analysis and Planning

The decommissioning of the former Athens International Airport presented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform obsolete infrastructure into a resilient, climate-positive park. The design of the 650-acre Ellinikon Park, Greece’s first large-scale green infrastructure project, began with a climate action goal-setting exercise. Sasaki worked with the client to pursue ambitious climate action goals while rigorously researching local ecosystems’ carbon sequestration abilities, water systems, the local industrial ecology, and material reuse on a massive scale. Through rounds of design iteration, testing, and advancement from planning to technical design phases, the park is estimated to achieve carbon neutrality in 35 years.

Key carbon reduction strategies included soil amendments and reuse, material reuse, afforestation, and minimizing new concrete applications. The team also undertook a full energy modeling study to size an on-site solar farm to offset operational energy.

The Ellinikon Park and coastal front will increase the allocation of open space per Athenian by 44%. It serves as an example for the future of Europe’s public spaces by providing an extraordinary public amenity with native habitat, themed destination play spaces, and a diversity of recreational programs for all Athenians to enjoy.

University of California, Berkeley Accessible Paths and Places Master Plan – Honor Award in Analysis and Planning

The UC Berkeley Accessible Paths and Places Master Plan establishes a cohesive vision and set of projects that create a network of accessible pathways and open spaces throughout UC Berkeley’s Campus Park. The project evolved from the university’s ADA Transition Plan, which cataloged 42,000 accessibility barriers across campus. The plan–which includes design solutions at site and campus-wide scales–goes beyond ADA compliance to embrace human-centered design practices, which focus on each person’s unique experiences and sensory responses in the built environment. The 2024 ASLA jury noted that the plan “will be a reference and a benchmark for landscape architecture design.”

The first planning effort at UC Berkeley to comprehensively address accessibility across the campus landscape, the plan situates 37 discrete landscape projects across 7 corridors, nestled within an overall accessibility framework. Each project identifies existing slope deficiencies, proposed slope strategies, site features to be retained or removed, earthwork analysis, sections, perspective views, and plans to achieve thoughtful compliance. Proposed projects address accessibility while also promoting placemaking to reinforce the campus landscape identity.

The plan prioritizes barrier-free accessible pathways of 5% slopes or less, leveraging ramps only when necessary, avoids tokenizing the accessible experience, reimagines associated quads, courtyards, and plazas, and reinforces legibility through material guidelines. This novel project advances UC Berkeley’s legacy of disability rights advocacy and provides a precedent for institutions in addressing accessibility. 

Carbon Conscience – Award of Excellence in Research

Sasaki developed the Carbon Conscience App as a free tool to help designers think holistically about carbon and to have the ability to assess carbon-related impacts from the early stages of the planning and design process. The application brings together landscape, architectural, and ecological literature into a common platform to make the potential global warming impacts of the built environment easy to understand and address in early design phases—when design project teams can change course, adjust frameworks, and most effectively advocate for low-carbon design. 

The research started with a literature review to understand global warming impacts of land use decisions, since land use is the most fundamental decision-making unit for planning and urban design work. The investigation expanded to include over 170 unique materials and product typologies specified in landscape design projects. The team aggregated life cycle assessments (LCAs) and used box-plot statistics to report carbon factor ranges per typology. 

Designers can test initial ideas by sketching on a digital interface, receiving feedback on how carbon emissions change as they sketch using an intuitive drawing format. The tool is recommended for an urban district, neighborhood, or campus master plan scale, but has enough specificity for site-scale design, allowing it to be used for rapid iteration and testing of early concepts and ideas.

Carbon Conscience is the only peer-reviewed dataset and application that brings landscape and architectural land uses together to study planning decisions from a whole project life cycle assessment perspective. It is now being integrated into the next generation of Pathfinder, Landkit, and EPIC tools. This research and resulting tool significantly impacts how landscape architects can tackle the challenge of decarbonizing the built environment through a collective effort. 

Congratulations to the Ellinikon Park, UC Berkeley, and Carbon Conscience design teams for their hard work and recognition! Learn more about the 2024 ASLA National Awards and recipients here.