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Fernandez Selected for 2019-2020 LAF Fellowship

It is with great pride and excitement that we announce Sasaki’s Diana Fernandez, ASLA, PLA, has been selected for the 2019-2020 cohort of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership.

Each of the selected participants will engage in a yearlong journey to develop their leadership capacity and work on ideas that have the potential to create positive and profound change in the landscape architecture profession, the environment, and humanity. Fernandez’s project—Heterogeneous Futures: A Framework for Ecologically & Culturally Diverse Landscapes—will work to enable social, cultural, and linguistic knowledge to be an integral part of the design process in order to promote truly resilient landscapes that represent all potential users.

“The fellowship is personally significant to me because it represents my unrelenting quest for innovative practice models that allow the narratives of unrepresented groups to be celebrated in the physical constructs of place,” says Fernandez, discussing the significance of her fellowship. “It is my attempt to redefine design excellence under a different lens that aims to create spaces in which multiple narratives can co-exist.”

The LAF Fellows will each receive a $25,000 award and dedicate 12 weeks of time over the course of the coming year to pursue their proposed project. The Fellowship will consist of project work and research, supported by discussions, critiques, mentorship, and leadership opportunities that occur during three 3-day residencies in Washington, DC.

The LAF Jury said of this year’s fellows, “the Landscape Architecture Foundation is proud to make this investment in the people and ideas that will drive the future of landscape architecture, and we look forward to working with the cohort as they tackle important challenges and issues.”

Congratulations to the entire 2019-2020 LAF cohort, on this great honor!

Full abstract of Fernandez’s project:

Heterogeneous Futures: A Framework for Ecologically & Culturally Diverse Landscapes

Historically, the profession of landscape architecture has innovated practice models through distinct periods, such as the national replications, modernism, and landscape ecology movements. Today, the natural progression for our profession is to enable social, cultural, and linguistic knowledge to be an integral part of the design process. This project seeks to gather these realms of knowledge through case studies and a book manuscript to promote truly resilient landscapes that reflect the collective experiences of the people who will inhabit the spaces.

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