CAPLA Receives Top Spots in 2018 EPA Campus RainWorks Challenge

Two of the six winning teams in the 2018 EPA Campus RainWorks Challenge were from Bo Yang's third year master of landscape architecture design studio. This marks the second year in a row that CAPLA student teams held two of the top spots. The CAPLA teams received 2nd place in the Demonstration Project Category and an Honorable Mention in the Master Plan Category.

The Campus RainWorks Challenge is an annual "collegiate competition that engages the next generation of environmental professionals to design innovative solutions for stormwater pollution."

CAPLA students collaborated with students Jack Anderson and Samantha Swartz from hydrology. An key part of the EPA challenge is identifying the watershed in which the site falls in order to calculate the rates of storm water runoff. Teams used this data to inform their designs of passive and active rainwater storage systems, which include check dams, permeable surfaces, and cisterns.

2nd place - Demonstration Project Category: (Re)Searching for a Spot

Team members Matthew Lutheran, Aaron Johnson; and Zhiyuan Song re-imagined a parking lot that sits just south of the CAPLA building, creating a design that routes water through a series of swales that slow and treat water before pollutants can concentrate and pollute larger waterways.

Honorable Mention - Master Plan Category: Socio-Hydrology

Team members Jon Choi, Jennifer Moscato, and Cody White chose to bring many of the green infrastructure improvements to the forefront of their design in a way that would directly affect and improve the user experience, rather than hiding the functional site improvements behind the scenes. This project was also the recipient of the 2018 Liba Wheat Prize and the 2019 Award of Excellence - Student Collaborative from the Arizona Chapter of the ASLA.