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Two BSA Unbuilt Architecture and Design Awards for Grace La and LA DALLMAN

LA DALLMAN's

LA DALLMAN's "Industrial Capriccio: Floating Garden"

Among the six projects honored with the Boston Society of Architects’ (BSA) 2017 Unbuilt Architecture and Design Awards are two by the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s (GSD) Grace La and her architectural practice, LA DALLMAN. The practice’s winning projects are entitled “Industrial Capriccio: Floating Garden” (pictured) and “Waterlily Landing.”

Unique among the BSA’s awards program, the Unbuilt Architecture and Design Award honors architectural designs of any project type that have yet to be built or constructed.

LA DALLMAN’s “Waterlily Landing” presents a waterfront project to serve as a new learning and recreation space. “Floating Garden,” meanwhile, offers an infrastructural transformation of an existing rail bridge into a new amphitheater and public park.

While some viewers may do a double-take at the non-traditional figures depicted in “Floating Garden,” the presentation is intentionally symbolic.

“Because the project transforms an abandoned swing bridge, creating new potential for civic space on an old existing structure, these renderings borrow imagery of scenes from the past,” La notes, “collapsing timeless virtues of gathering and promenade to illuminate its future.”

LA DALLMAN's "Industrial Capriccio: Floating Garden"
LA DALLMAN’s “Industrial Capriccio: Floating Garden”

The work of LA DALLMAN explores architecture as transformed site, reshaping the raw materials of found and abstracted landscape in projects of diverse scale and type. Among the broad range of their work, notable projects include urban infrastructure, public space, artistic installations, houses, and civic buildings.

Led by James Dallman and La, who currently serves as Professor of Architecture at the GSD, LA DALLMAN is internationally recognized for the integration of architecture, engineering and landscape. The practice has been awarded over thirty professional honors since its inception in 1999. Among these are an Emerging Voice award (in 2010) by the Architectural League of New York, the national Bruner Award for Urban Excellence Silver Medal, and The Rice Design Alliance Prize.

At the GSD, La is Professor of Architecture, Chair of the Practice Platform, and coordinator of the second-semester architecture core program, in which she teaches design studio. She previously served as Director of the GSD’s Master of Architecture Program. La is also a 1995 graduate of the GSD, graduating with thesis distinction and winning the Clifford Wong Housing Prize.