Hannah Moll Wins Awards From American Society of Landscape Architects' Arkansas Chapter

Images by Hannah Moll

These mixed media graphics explore the experiential qualities of distinct character areas on Mount Kessler. They were part of Hannah Moll's award-winning project, "Mt. Kessler: Shaking Hands with the Landscape."

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Hannah Moll, an honors student in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, recently received three awards for her design work from the Arkansas chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. She was recognized at this year's awards banquet, held Oct. 17 in Fayetteville.

Moll's projects "Mt. Kessler: Shaking Hands with the Landscape" and "Pine Bluff: Reconstructing the Future" won merit awards in the student analysis and planning category. Her project "Otter Creek: An Elevated Walk Through the Woods" won a merit award in the student general design category.

Moll is a fourth-year landscape architecture student from Edmond, Oklahoma.

"I am very happy for the recognition, and thankful," Moll said. "It was an honor. I had no idea I could win all three of them."

Moll's projects were the result of coursework she completed in previous years. After being encouraged to enter the annual competition by two landscape architecture professors — Carl Smith and Phoebe Lickwar — she looked at the Arkansas ASLA category requirements and chose her best projects to enter. She worked with Lickwar for the Pine Bluff project and with Smith, along with fellow professors Noah Billig and Kimball Erdman, for the Mount Kessler project.

"The entries were all submitted by me," Moll said, "but I want to acknowledge them as the people who supported me during the process and the professors who helped me along the way with these projects."

"Hannah is an extremely strong all-rounder," Smith said. "The profession of landscape architecture is extremely broad — from very small scale, such as residential design, all the way to large-scale regional planning. She is unusual in that she is equally strong in all those scales. She is also very skilled across a range of different communication types — she writes well, she's very strong verbally, and, of course, her graphics are extremely good. So, she was able to be very eloquent in her descriptions of her work, very thoughtful in the way she connected the theory of what we were teaching to her designs, and very expressive in terms of the graphics she used to communicate her ideas. I knew she would be a strong contender, and that's why I encouraged her so much to put her work in for consideration."

Moll entered the Mount Kessler project and the downtown Pine Bluff revitalization project in the analysis and planning category, which, according to the contest guidelines, recognizes the wide variety of professional activities that lead to, guide and evaluate landscape architecture design. The jury considered the quality of analysis and planning effort; context; environmental sensitivity and sustainability; likelihood of successful implementation; and value to the client, the public and other designers.

She entered the Otter Creek project into the general design category, which, according to the contest guidelines, recognizes site-specific works of landscape architecture. The jury considered the quality of design, design context, environmental sensitivity and sustainability; and design value to the client and to other designers.

"I chose projects I had done in my third year of school," Moll said. "Usually, you get better and better with graphics [and can get] deeper into development of certain projects."

The Mount Kessler project was the result of an assignment from Moll's vertical studio class, taught by Erdman, Smith and Billig in fall 2014. The instructors and students worked with Randy Hester, the Garvan Visiting Professor in Landscape Architecture. Erdman said that the work on Mount Kessler consisted of multiple projects building on one another. Smith said that each of the steps the students took during this project was valuable.

"The Mount Kessler project was really important," Smith said. "It really demonstrates the real value landscape architecture can bring to a complex endeavor, which is to understand Mount Kessler. There are ecologists working on Mount Kessler. There are community groups that are related to cultural history [working on the mountain]. There are ornithologists, entomologists, all [working to] bring unique and valuable appreciation for what the mountain is all about. Landscape architects capture the character of the place and its capacity to accept change. And, therefore, it is a vital ingredient in making informed decisions about future development. Otherwise, we run the risk of losing high valued landscape, and Mount Kessler is extremely beautiful. It needs to be sensitively handled so that development occurs in an appropriate and sympathetic way."

In spring 2015, Moll was in Lickwar's "Resilient Cities" studio. Lickwar said that this studio investigated strategies for building resilience and addressing issues of environmental justice in 21st century cities. Students gained an understanding of the critical role green infrastructure plays in strengthening urban neighborhoods and learned how design can be leveraged to address water issues related to global warming, she said.

A particular focus of the studio, Lickwar said, was to imagine and create new synergies between green infrastructure and urban life. Green infrastructure has the capacity to protect cities from devastating events and threatening conditions, promoting the return of ecological functioning to degraded landscapes while creating new aesthetic expressions of urban form. The studio introduced students to critical topics related to emerging practice — design for resilience, sustainable stormwater systems, ecosystem services, biodiversity — and asked students to speculate on the transformative possibilities for rebuilding urban communities.

Lickwar said Moll's project proposed a set of strategies for temporary and long-term redevelopment of vacant land in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Pine Bluff has one of the highest crime rates in the country, she said, and has seen a mass exodus of its urban population in recent decades.

"Hannah's design proposed the development of vacant parcels for increased flood resistance and economic development, a two-fold approach that could feasibly bring life back to the historically significant downtown and provide much needed quality design for this community," Lickwar said.

The Otter Creek project was created when Moll and another landscape architecture student at the time, Katie Dunn, entered and won the student category of Envision Little Rock 2014: Otter Creek contest, organized by StudioMain in Little Rock. The competition proposed utilizing innovative design and planning concepts to retrofit the Otter Creek neighborhood area, first established in 1976, to create a more diverse, cohesive urban and suburban fabric within walkable and identifiable public spaces.

For this, Moll partnered with Katie Dunn, then a fifth-year student, who has since graduated and is now working at a Dallas firm. They spent about two months working on the project outside of their regular classwork, and then Moll used the material as her honors project.

"I think this [ASLA contest] is really a good stepping stone to give me confidence to push myself to enter into bigger competitions," Moll said. "I am really thankful for my teachers — and having them support me has been really wonderful."