Qizhi Gao, who graduated from the Faculty with a Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) degree this spring, has been awarded a 2024 Student Honour Award by World Landscape Architecture.

Every year, the landscape field’s leading online platform recognizes student work showing innovation in design, analysis and planning with awards in a range of categories.

Gao won in the category of Concept-Analysis & Planning for his final-year thesis project, entitled “Counter-mapping the U.S.-Mexico Border Landscape.”

The project was presented at the Faculty in April of this year and addresses the lack of visual mapping when it comes to how the desert landscape in southern Arizona, described by Gao as “one of the most perilous zones for illegal border crossings in the United States,” is mediated and instrumentalized by multiple and intersecting actors.

“This project,” Gao writes, “explores a counter-mapping methodology, overlaying a range of open-source data—including [data from] online government sites, research and conservation groups, academic publications, works by artists and activists, migrant testimonials and photographic documentations—in a manner that reveals a new reading of the border landscape.”

By mapping such phenomena as “terrain and surveillance,” “clandestine migration,” “desert water” and “hidden violence” in the context of the border landscape, the project sheds light on the stark contrast, as Gao puts it, “between humanitarian acts and certain strategies [that] intentionally direct migrants toward their peril or surveil their struggle for dozens of miles.”

The landscape examined, he concludes, isn’t a fixed one. “Importantly, every life-giving or shelter-giving source is also a life-threatening source.”

In addition to Gao’s Honour Award, a project by fellow MLA grad Giuliana Costanzo was shortlisted by WLA in the Graduate category.

Entitled Weaving Mosaics: Mending Chaco’s Impenetrable Forest, Costanzo’s project (illustrated below) explores an alternative approach to environmental land protection in South America’s Gran Chaco, the continent’s second-largest biome after the Amazon, from a landscape architect’s multi-layered perspective. 

“The objective,” she wrote, “is to address deforestation while questioning conventional forest conservation and land-use management strategies to protect one of the last large continuous non-tropical forests in South America.”

Costanzo’s thesis advisor was Matthew Perotto. Gao’s thesis advisor was Liat Margolis.

This year, World Landscape Architecture received over 125 student-award entries in four categories (Concept-Analysis & Planning, Concept-Large Design, Concept-Small Design and Graduate Projects) from universities around the world.

The 2024 jury was made up of four leading academics in the field of landscape architecture: Elisa C. Cattaneo of the Politecnico di Milano, Craig Douglas of Harvard University’s GSD, Shen Jie of Tongji University’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning and Alessandro Martinelli of Chinese Culture University in Taipei.

Banner image: The Context Map from Qizhi Gao’s Counter-mapping project shows the unintentional convergence of terrain, surveillance, flooding, riverbeds, shrubs and water sources with sites of migrant fatality.