
Below is a detailed description of each category in the 2025 WLA Awards and suggestions for the types (typology) of projects that may be entered. If you have a query about the category for your entry please email [email protected]
Download the 2025 WLA Awards Entry Guide [pdf]
Professional Award Categories
Built – Commercial Residential Design
Projects that include multi-dwelling residential designs that includes low, medium or high-rise developments that are for residential or mixed-use development(including residential). Entries for the Commercial Residential Design category include show houses, townhouse developments, apartment/condo buildings, multiple high rises, community developments, and other multi-dwelling projects. Projects should show creativity and sustainable practices that address the needs of residents whilst also being innovative in their approach.
Built – Private Residential Design
This category seeks to recognise single-dwelling residential landscape designs of varying scales, from small to large projects. These projects can include a rooftop garden, balcony garden, private home garden, estate garden, ranch, or homestead garden for a single dwelling. Private Residential Design should create designs that are not only aesthetic but also innovative, personalized solutions that reflect the desires and lifestyles of the homeowners while respecting the landscape and its context.
Built – Small Public Space
Recognizing the importance of small-scale design projects less than 2,000m2/21,500 sq.ft. These projects can include pocket parks, parklets, public rooftops, art installations, playgrounds, experimental and demonstration gardens, show gardens, and interior landscapes that are accessible to the public. Any landscape or design that showcases design, innovation, and resolved implementation is included. The Built Small category seeks to recognise that small projects can also profoundly impact place.
Built – Large Public Space
Celebrating large-scale projects that are greater than 2,000m2/21,500 sq.ft. These projects include parks, gardens, plazas, piers, amphitheatres, squares, campuses, arboretums, wetlands, shared streets, waterfronts, and landscape networks. The Built Large Public Space category seeks to honour projects of expansive scale that integrate natural and built elements to be innovative and positively impact the landscape and people.
Built – Institutional/Campus (Education, Health, Museums, Government Buildings)
Projects in this category should enhance learning environments, support well-being, and create inspiring public spaces. Entries should demonstrate innovative design, sustainability, and social impact, contributing to the cultural and functional value of institutions. Successful projects integrate landscape and architecture, fostering community engagement and resilience. Whether a university campus, hospital garden, civic plaza, or museum grounds, submissions should exemplify excellence in placemaking, accessibility, and ecological stewardship, setting new benchmarks for institutional landscapes.
Built – Hospitality (Hotels, Resorts, Lodges, Tourist Attractions, Event Spaces)
The Hospitality category seeks to honor exceptional landscape architecture in hotels, resorts, lodges, tourist attractions, and event spaces. This category recognizes projects that create immersive, memorable experiences while balancing aesthetics, functionality, and sustainability. Entries should showcase innovative design, ecological sensitivity, and cultural authenticity, enhancing guest experiences and reinforcing a sense of place. From luxury resorts to urban event venues, successful projects integrate landscape with architecture, promote well-being, and support local biodiversity. Submissions should demonstrate excellence in placemaking, accessibility, and environmental stewardship, setting new standards for hospitality landscapes.
Built – Masterplanning & Urban Design
Masterplanning and Urban Design are crucial to shaping our urban environments, cities, and towns. Entries in this category should showcase the transformative impact of landscape design, which enhances the place while incorporating innovative and sustainable design principles. Projects that may be entered are greenways, riverfronts, shared streets, post-industrial, repurposed landscapes, linear parks, park networks, and ecological belts.
Built – Sustainability and Resilience
Seeks to recognise innovative projects that address pressing environmental challenges through sustainable design and resilient strategies. This category celebrates landscapes that mitigate climate impacts, enhance ecological health, and promote long-term community and environmental well-being. These projects exemplify the power of landscape architecture to create adaptive, regenerative, and resource-efficient spaces.
Conceptual – Analysis and Planning
Designers often spend considerable time and effort developing documents that include significant analysis and planning for future landscapes. This category can include planning documents, master plans, post-occupancy reports, design manuals, guidelines, management plans, frameworks, planning overlays, policies, regulations, and other landscape evaluation reports. Entries must include analysis and planning content, the project may be built, however most of the submission should focus on the analysis and planning component.
Conceptual – Residential Design
Residential landscape design is vital in creating the first place where people often experience landscape and nature. This category looks to honour conceptual design for single and multi-dwelling residential design (private and commercial). Entries in this category can include concepts for single houses, apartments/condos, townhouses, homesteads, ranches, multiple residential developments.
Concept – Private Space
This category showcases the potential of conceptual and unbuilt private spaces to influence future landscape architecture by combining aesthetics, sustainability, and functionality. Submissions may include hotels, resorts, offices (high rise and campus), mixed use, private gardens, private tourism (theme parks, reserves, marinas), universities, schools, education facilties, health (hospitals, aged care,) airports, mixed use developments, renewable energy installations, water treatment, waste to energy facilities, agricultural & forestry sites (farms, private forest), industrial sites (factories, logistics hubs, ports,). This category underscores the potential of landscape architecture to elevate private developments sites into models of sustainability, ecological health, and human-centric design.
Concept – Public Space
Seeks to acknowledge the visionary, conceptual and unbuilt projects exploring innovative public space design approaches. This category celebrates designs prioritising accessibility, inclusivity, creativity, and community engagement, offering fresh ideas for urban and rural landscapes. Projects may include parks, plazas, squares, streets, waterfronts, esplanades, memorials, playgrounds, outdoor theatres, botanical gardens, therapeutic gardens, cutural institutions, seasonal installations, public art spaces or urban interventions, public spaces for cultural gatherings, festivals, or performances, town halls, memorials, monuments, green infrastructure concepts, eco-parks or natural reserves, climate parks, waterfronts, promenades, riverfronts, beaches, public transit stations. These projects reflect innovative thinking and the potential for transforming public spaces into vibrant, resilient, and inclusive environments that can shape future cities and communities.
Conceptual – Masterplanning & Urban Design
Conceptual Masterplanning & Urban Design projects can incorporate new visionary approaches, ideas and processes in design due to their scale and ability to provide solutions for shaping the future of cities and landscapes. Entries in this category can include conceptual design for city masterplans, urban renewal, greenways, shared streets, community gardens, post-industrial landscapes, repurposed landscapes, linear parks, green infrastructure plans, park networks, ecological belts, neighbourhood redevelopments or districts, smart city concepts, urban mobility networks, walkability masterplans, eco-city plans, resiliency plans, biodiversity networks, public health urban design, flood resilient urban design, food network urban design, urban design manuals, design guidelines. These projects should highlight the potential of landscape architecture to create sustainable, resilient, and vibrant urban environments for diverse populations.
TCLF Cultural Landscape Awards
Human involvement and occupation have affected, influenced, and/or shaped cultural landscapes. Often associated with a significant person, community, or event, they can range from thousands of acres to a tiny park or garden. Collectively, cultural landscapes are works of art, narratives of culture, and expressions of regional identity. Cultural landscapes shape our shared public memory.
These Cultural Landscape Awards, in partnership with The Cultural Landscape Foundation, recognizes the holistic planning, design, and stewardship efforts that reveal and assign value to a landscape’s palimpsest – embracing historic and cultural assets and systems in the same way that traditional practice addresses dynamic natural and ecological systems.
Cultural Landscape – Design Excellence & Innovation
The Design Excellence & Innovation category seeks to recognise outstanding achievements in the stewardship and transformation of cultural landscapes. This award recognises projects that demonstrate exceptional creativity, and innovative approaches in making visible the history of place through small and large design interventions.
Applicants should state how success has been measured and the landscape architect’s role in the design process. Projects may range from those that address historical (and purposeful) erasure, the nature/culture dilemma, pro bono commitments in response to limited budgets, the challenge of rigid government standards, and, for public landscapes, innovative public engagement tools and strategies.
Projects should illustrate how significant character-defining landscape features have been safeguarded and how the work did not have an adverse/negative effect on the cultural landscape.
Cultural Landscape – Planning & Research
The Planning & Research category honors exemplary and innovative work in the investigation, documentation, analysis, and proposed design and management strategies. The landscape architects should state how research and comprehensive planning were undertaken for culturally significant landscapes and how the research results created the framework for proposed design and management strategies.
Applicants should state how landscape architects participated in the planning and/or research processes. Projects may include masterplans; frameworks or historic landscape restoration studies; ecological and cultural resilience assessments; cultural landscape management guidelines; and, educational and interpretive strategies.
These are planning efforts that safeguard a landscape’s integrity and authenticity and, in managing change, foster a deeper understanding of and engagement with place by revealing forgotten histories, overlooked historical associations, or marginalized peoples/communities.
Selected projects should convey how research and analysis supported a depth of understanding that daylit history and expanded knowledge, while also supporting an understanding of the landscape’s cultural, ecological, and social context(s).
Applications should also note innovative methodologies or technologies that were used to analyze and interpret research findings.
Editors’ Award
Damian Holmes, the editor of WLA will select a project that is visionary and addresses the critical issues facing the world. All Entrants are eligible to be selected for this Award, and entrants are not required to register or include a separate entry.
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You can purchase your 2025 WLA Awards registration for $250AUD (approximately 165USD) at https://worldlandscapearchitect.com/product/2025-wla-awards-registration/
Student Awards
The Student Awards are held separately and will be open for registrations on June 17, 2025