Liana Rosenblum, Adriana Pinto-Pro, and Delaney Gardner have won a BSLA Undergrad Honor Award for their project, "Recovering Parkville's Post-Industrial Scar." Winning projects will be featured in BSLA's annual publication, Fieldbook.
The team completed their project during the Fall 2025 Senior Urban Design Studio taught by Frank Sleegers and Michael Amato. Students worked with the City of Hartford, CT, Neighborhood Planning Department to envision the recovery and revitalization of a former scrapyard in Hartford's Parkville neighborhood.
Rosenblum and Pinto-Pro earned their bachelor's in landscape architecture from UMass LARP in May 2026. Gardner, who joined the studio through the Five College Interchange, recently graduated from Mount Holyoke College.
What was your goal for Parkville?
"Our goal was to accurately address the neighborhood’s needs by providing tangible, affordable landscape interventions. Our design reintegrates the vacant site into the surrounding neighborhoods, provides opportunities for housing and homeownership, and restores the Park River as a green amenity."
What does this BSLA Honor Award mean to you?
"The BSLA Honor Award reaffirms the pride we hold in our project and the potential of our design to make real change in a community. We feel encouraged to be confident and bring our ideals, values, and voices into the field, especially as young designers. The site presented a unique challenge with real-world social, economic, and environmental contexts. We were so passionate to explore and learn about the community and loved incorporating our research into the design, so this recognition feels rewarding for our ambition and hard work. Our project was inspired by the creativity of and collaboration with our classmates and our incredible professor, Frank Sleegers. We are so excited to pursue more community-oriented work in each of our respective fields and can’t wait to take this learning experience into whatever opportunities come next for us!"
- Liana Rosenblum, Adriana Pinto-Pro, and Delaney Gardner
View the team's winning designs on BSLA.org. Learn more about the Fall 2025 Urban Design Studio on Inside UMass.