Solano Receives American Society of Landscape Architects Professional Award of Excellence in Research

Samantha Solano, assistant professor of landscape architecture, was recently awarded the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Professional Award of Excellence in Research for The Visualizing Equity in Landscape Architecture (VELA) Project, the first visual database to compare gender representation over time and location in the field of landscape architecture.

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The ASLA Professional Award of Excellence in Research recognizes research that identifies and investigates challenges posed in landscape architecture, providing results that advance the body of knowledge for the profession.

The VELA Project, led by Solano and T.J. Marston, visiting instructor of landscape architecture at Florida International University and founding principal at PLOT Studio, is a research initiative that reveals, spatializes and acknowledges the status of gender equity throughout landscape architecture. Over 20 years have passed since the last report documenting women’s careers in landscape architecture, and the issues raised then are similar to many problems women face now.

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To understand why these disparities still exist and the gaps associated with them, the VELA project offers a current review of women’s status in both academia and the profession. The research collected over 17,000 unique data points from multiple public sources, and its analysis organizes the data into a series of robust visualizations that catalog current trends and highlight opportunities to improve gender equity in the profession. Solano describes the purpose of the research as a question of value—to recognize where the profession falls short and where critical re-alignments must occur. The project is a provocative and timely exploration that serves to inform, instigate and empower the landscape architecture community to rally together and transform the future of practice.

Solano, who teaches graduate and undergraduate studios and advanced representation courses and is a licensed landscape architect in Utah, is also the founding principal of JUXTOPOS and a co-collaborator of the International Landscape Collaborative (ILC).

Solano’s scholarship engages with revealing unrepresented narratives overlooked throughout landscape architecture discourse. Her work explores two main streams – arid territories and the social, political and cultural values that have led to the mismanagement of desert lands, and the empowerment of design, environmental and racial justice narratives in practice, the profession and the academy. Her research and design methodologies are centered on using critical mapping as a means of revealing unrecognized, unformalized and unrepresented relationships hidden throughout the landscape.