Boston Flora

Tag: Design Competition

  • Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Center House Entry Garden Competition

    The Berkshire Botanical Garden (BBG) is launching a call for proposals to select a designer or design team to help create a new entry garden on its 15-acre property. This call for proposals is open to all students currently enrolled in an accredited landscape architecture program in the United States and Canada. Entrants can be individuals or teams of students.

    BBG is seeking an innovative proposal that will complement the design of its newly restored and expanded Center House building and surrounding established garden areas. The c. 4,000 sq.ft. Entry Garden area will become the new gateway for tens of thousands of annual visitors touring the Garden, attending special events on BBG grounds and inside the Center House, and participating in BBG’s varied horticultural and educational programs that take place year-round.

    The deadline to submit proposals electronically is May 19, 2017 at 5pm EDT. (A preliminary Registration Form and a $50 registration fee must first be submitted by April 17, 2017 at 5pm EDT.)

    Any applications submitted after the May 19, 2017 deadline will not be accepted.

    For further information, please contact:

    Michael Beck
    Executive Director
    Berkshire Botanical Garden
    P.O. Box 826
    Stockbridge, MA 01262
    competition@berkshirebotanical.org

    The winning design will be selected by a five-member jury made up of independent designers, horticulturalists, and landscape architects, on the basis of the creative response to the design brief as well as originality and clarity of the concept and the creative approach. The winning submission must take into consideration the specifics of the site, the challenges of the location, BBG’s estimated project implementation budget and timeline, the demands on ongoing maintenance, and the programming envisioned by BBG for the garden area and the adjoining Center House building.

    The winning design and two runners up will be announced on June 2, 2017 on the competition website and through local and regional news media. All participants will receive the results of the competition via email.

    The winning design proposal will be used as the basis for the new Center House Entry Garden that will be built beginning in the fall of 2017. BBG’s staff and design consultants will provide feedback on the concept described in the winning submission, and will work with the winning designer(s) towards a final design and construction drawings, which must be finalized by July 7, 2017.

    April 3, 2017— Registration Opens
    April 17, 2017— Online registration and fee payment deadline
    Interested designers submit contact information and nonrefundable processing fee of $50 to BBG
    April 24, 2017— Deadline for questions to BBG
    Registered designers are invited to submit questions to BBG at any point from time of registration until 5pm EDT. BBG’s answers to all questions will be posted on the competition site on a rolling basis, but no later than April 28, 2017
    May 19, 2017— Deadline for competition submission (electronic)
    Registrants submit design materials electronically
    June 2, 2017— Announcement of winner and runners-up
    June 2-July 7, 2017— Development period for winning project
    Winning designer or team to work with BBG and BBG’s design consultants on details of design. BBG has engaged Landscape Architects Okerstrom Lang Ltd. to draft all construction documents.
    July 7, 2017— Construction drawings for winning project finalized by Okerstrom Lang Ltd.
    August, 2017— Dedication of Center House Building and presentation of winning Entry Garden design to the public
    Winning designer or representative of winning design team will be invited to attend. Exact date will be dependent on building construction schedule.
    September, 2017— Construction begins for Entry Garden
    May 6, 2018— Dedication of new entry garden on first day of 2018 visiting season at BBG

    The Jury:

    Page Dickey, Writer and Garden Designer (Falls Village, CT)
    Fergus Garrett, Head Gardener at Great Dixter Garden and CEO, The Great Dixter Charitable Trust (East Sussex, United Kingdom)
    Renny Reynolds, Landscape Architect and Co-Owner of Hortulus Farm (Bucks County, PA)
    Mark E. Strieter, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (New York, NY and Charlottesville, VA)
    Matthew Urbanski, Principal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., (New York, NY)

    The winning designer will be awarded an honorarium of $1,500. Two runners-up will each receive $750. These three designs will be exhibited at BBG during the summer of 2017, and BBG will seek to publicize the designs through local, regional and national media channels.

    BBG plans to have a design development and construction budget of $100,000 available to implement the Center House Entry Garden. However, we reserve the right not to implement the design based on unforeseen future funding constraints or for any other reason.

  • Through Tuesday, December 15 – Lilac Sunday T-shirt Competition

    Create a piece of Arnold Arboretum history & enter the contest to design the 2016 Lilac Sunday T-shirt!  The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University invites artists of all ages to submit their designs for Lilac Sunday 2016.  The winning 2015 design is shown below.

    Lilac-themed t-shirts have been a tradition at Lilac Sunday for many years, and continue to be a highly anticipated and popular memento of this event. Entry is free, but entries must be received by Tuesday, December 15. For complete details visit http://www.arboretum.harvard.edu/news-events/lilac-t-shirt-contest/

  • Suburbia Transformed Design Competition

    We know many of our readers live outside the City of Boston.  Applications are now available online for an exciting design competition. The James Rose Center announces its third biennial design competition and exhibition Suburbia Transformed 3.0, One Garden at a Time: Exploring the Aesthetics of Landscape Experience in the Age of Sustainability. The goal of Suburbia Transformed 3.0 is to promote and celebrate residential designs that go beyond “green” by explicitly using sustainable strategies, tactics, and technologies to enrich the aesthetic spatial experience of people. The emphasis is on how such sustainable landscapes can be beautiful, inspiring, perhaps profound, and serve as examples for transforming the suburban residential fabric, one garden at a time. This is an international competition for built and visionary (unbuilt) residential landscapes in professional and student categories. Entries are due before February 18, 2014. Details for Suburbia Transformed 3.0 are available at www.jamesrosecenter.org. ST3.0 is co-sponsored by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and the NJASLA.  Pictured is an image from past winner danespencer-landscapearchitect.com.

    http://danespencer-landscapearchitect.com/wp-content/themes/danespencer/images/wisconsin_slideshow/wisconsin_image_1.jpg

  • Division II Seeks Designers for Next March’s Flower Show

    We reprint in its entirety a call for designers sent out by Massachusetts Horticultural Society.  For those floral arrangers out there, this is an opportunity to shine:

    If you were at Blooms! last March, one of the indelible memories of that event is likely the spectacular floral interpretation of a dragon created by renowned designer Arabella Dane.  Her colorful, imposing dragon seemed to leap out at passersby, hardly the stereotype of a ‘flower arrangement’.  It drew large crowds, many of them drawn by word of mouth from offices above the exhibit space.  “You gotta go down and see this thing,” people told one another.

    Ms. Dane’s creation was part of Blooms!, of course, but was mounted within a segment of Blooms! known as ‘Division II’, or MassHort’s ‘Open Class’.  She was responding to a challenge to ‘interpret the gates of Chinatown’.  And interpret them, she did.

    For the past quarter century, MassHort has divided its floral design competition into two pieces.  Division I adheres to the rules of National Garden Clubs, Inc., (NGC) and it produces memorable designs.  But near the top of Division I’s rules is a requirement that an exhibitor must be a member in good standing of an NGC-affiliated club.

    “MassHort created Division II to encourage amateurs who weren’t members of NGC clubs to participate,” says Joyce Bakshi, chair of Division II for the 2010 edition of Blooms!, which will be held in conjunction with the Boston Flower & Garden Show in March.  “The Society wanted to find a way to be more inclusive.”

    Joining a garden club wouldn’t seem to be a huge hurdle to a would-be designer, but not all designers are gardeners or have the time to join a club, and not all garden clubs are affiliates of NGC.  Also, some very good designers – including many professionals – have careers that preclude joining a club that meets on, say, Thursday mornings.

    “Your next-door neighbor may be a very talented amateur,” Joyce says.  “This is their opportunity to get a foothold in the very exciting world of floral design.”

    Both divisions follow the same general rules.  The chairman or an appointee writes a ‘schedule’ which becomes the law of the show.  The schedule contains a number of ‘classes’, with a minimum of four entries per class.  Division I’s Class 101, for example, is, “‘Romantic Abandon’, a design in the manner of the Victorian Period staged on a pedestal 36 inches high and 14 inches in diameter”.  To a floral designer, ‘Victorian Period’ is all the description needed to understand what kind of arrangement is acceptable… it’s all in that NGC rulebook.

    Division II follows the guidelines of Garden Clubs of America, or GCA.  A casual look at floral designs following NGC and GCA rules might not reveal much difference though, to a judge, the variations might be apparent.  The biggest difference is the club joining requirement. The schedule for Division II on the MassHort website (you can find it here) calls it an ‘Open Class’, which means anyone can enter, including that talented neighbor of yours.

    Division II allows designers to express their creativity in ways not allowed under NGC rules.  One isn’t better than the other, just different.  Many designers enter both divisions on different years.

    The Garden Club of the Back Bay is affiliated with NGC, so our members may exhibit in either Division.  For those of you who follow this site but are not members of a Garden Club, Division II is for you!