Georgia Tech’s EcoCommons Recognized with ASLA Honor Award

The EcoCommons Living Building Sector (LBS) received an Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in the “General Design” category. The project, led by Barge, was recognized at the ASLA’s annual professional awards ceremony.

The site, formerly a parking lot, is an eight-acre ecological park that reflects Georgia Tech’s desire to create an outdoor living-learning laboratory for students, faculty, and staff. As the landscape architect of record, Barge led a talented team that programmed, conceptualized, refined, and ultimately detailed the EcoCommons’ design. Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW) were the design landscape architects, Biohabitats was the ecological sciences partner, and Long Engineering (now Atlas) provided civil engineering services.

The park merges the site’s cultural and landscape heritage, creating a unique performance landscape and valuable natural environment with important educational resources. The project provides a native North Georgia Piedmont plant palette, integrates stormwater management, creates new habitats, provides for outdoor recreation, and creates opportunities for research and education.

Georgia Tech’s strategic plan calls, in part, for building a model sustainable campus. The EcoCommons Living Building Sector is a key component of this effort, featuring underground infiltration systems, vegetated swales, and an irrigation system connected to cisterns using reclaimed water. These improvements are estimated to reduce stormwater runoff by millions of gallons, benefiting downstream creeks and rivers. The site contributes to the campus’ tree canopy coverage goals while also collecting soil moisture, temperature, and air quality data to inform future research activities - true to the site’s living-learning laboratory mission.

The Living Building Sector is part of what will eventually be a much larger 80-acre EcoCommons system that will wind through the heart of campus. Meanwhile, the EcoCommons Living Building Sector remains the largest pure landscape architecture design project funded to-date in the University System of Georgia Board of Regents’ history.