2018 Best of Design Awards winner for Unbuilt – Landscape: Greers Ferry Water Garden

Designer: University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Location: Heber Springs, Arkansas

Developed by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, the Greers Ferry Water Garden proposal seeks to revive Edward Durell Stone’s forgotten plan for a water garden park. Contemporaneous with his design of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the internationally renowned architect’s equally monumental park concept was set to accompany the Greers Ferry Dam in Heber Springs, Arkansas. Stone’s design deployed late modernist tropes, combining monumentality and glamour throughout. However, his schematic vocabulary left gaps on matters of terrain passage, native planting, and water as an experiential medium. The updated vision offers a new environmental model for park design. Excess runoff collected through the dam’s impoundment of the river can be harvested and strategically recycled throughout the 269-acre water garden to grow new life and create higher-order niche ecologies.

Honorable Mention

Project name: Murchison Rogers Park
Designer: Surroundings
Location: El Paso, Texas