Journal
Introduction from the President of the Landscape Institute, Nigel Thorne FLI
I am delighted to introduce this year’s Landscape Institute Awards to you. This is the first awards ceremony under my presidency, and one which I hope will lead to a much wider engagement with our membership and a regular opportunity to celebrate excellence in the increasingly diverse range of projects and commissions that we, as professionals, are involved with.
Thank you to everyone who has submitted an entry for consideration and I would like to extend my personal congratulations to all of our award winners, those whose submissions have been highly commended and all of the runners up. When we take an opportunity such as this to highlight and showcase our extensive range of skills and knowledge it can only improve our professional standing in the wider world and emphasise the added benefit that engagement with our members can bring.
The quality of the submissions has once again been of an exceptionally high standard and the judging process a very difficult operation to conclude. The judges’ responded to the projects presented to them with praise for their high quality, excellent presentation and national and international importance. This reinforces the importance of the awards, not only for the individual winners but also the profession as a whole.
It is our intention to extend the categories still further. This is in response to the growing number of specialisms with which our members are now associated. We have had some excellent feedback from this year’s judges. There is no better way to applaud and celebrate the work of our members than to present awards of excellence. I would encourage every one of us to be proud of our achievements and ensure that your area of expertise can be highlighted via our awards process.
The judging event took on a very different and exciting format this year. We looked to involve strategic partners from outside the landscape architectural world, but within the wider built-environment professions.
This has proved to be an enormous success and I would like to extend my sincere thanks and gratitude to all of our judges and, of course, to our communications and marketing team, lead by Marco Forgione, whose efforts made the whole judging experience a fantastic occasion.
Everyone was invited to attend a ‘retreat-like’ weekend at an out-of-town location where individual experts with specialist knowledge across the whole range of award categories were organised into judging panels, each with a carefully selected Chair. This allowed opportunities for wide-ranging discussions within each panel and across the broader spectrum of issues outside the individual categories. We hope to build on this format in future years. I would like to conclude by reminding everyone that the Landscape Institute Awards ceremony will now take place annually. I know there are thousands of projects both nationally and internationally that deserve recognition, just as there are thousands of our members who should be proud to showcase their professionalism, talent and skills. We are all striving to achieve excellence and we now have an annual forum in which we can demonstrate to the widest possible audience just how important the work of landscape architects is. Nigel Thorne
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