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The UMass Design Building landscape is a campus project that joins ecological restoration, horticultural experimentation and hands-on teaching. Designed by STIMSON for the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts, it replaces a conventional lawn-centered approach with naturalized gardens, stormwater landscapes and an experimental rooftop planting. The project’s designers describe the building and grounds as teaching infrastructure; the available project account explains that intention but does not report measured ecological or educational outcomes.
What is the UMass Design Building landscape?
It is the landscape surrounding the University of Massachusetts Amherst Design Building, a facility that brings Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, and Building and Construction Technology together. STIMSON designed the landscape for the university, responding both to the building and to the history of the site as a place of landscape-architecture test plots. The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) recognized the project with a 2025 Professional Awards General Design Honor Award.
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The project is best understood as more than a planting scheme around a building. Its account links the site’s past, the restoration of a functioning ecosystem, regional plant communities, stormwater management and educational use. Those ideas are expressed in specific landscape elements, from woodland gardens and a ravine to a rooftop summit garden. The design team’s account is the source for these descriptions and aims; it does not publish quantified results showing how much stormwater is managed, how biodiversity changed or what students learned.
ASLA’s project page provides the design narrative, site history and planting examples. Its separate 2025 awards announcement confirms the award context.
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How does rewilding shape the landscape?
Here, “re-wilding” describes a landscape organized around naturalized, regionally inspired gardens and functioning ecological systems rather than a conventional expanse of maintained lawn. ASLA’s account says the project has no lawn. Instead, it names stormwater meadows, a north-slope ravine and eastern woodland gardens among the landscape’s principal features.
That shift matters because it treats planted areas as part of the site’s environmental and educational infrastructure, not simply as decoration. A meadow, woodland garden or ravine can make the relationships among landform, water and vegetation visible to people using the building. In this project, the designers specifically connect ecosystem restoration and horticultural experimentation to the landscape’s purpose. The available account, however, does not quantify habitat value or describe measured changes in water quality, runoff or species abundance. It is accurate to describe the systems and goals, but not to claim a documented performance result.
The plant list includes species such as red maple, butterfly weed, New England aster, little bluestem, bearberry, balsam fir and eastern hemlock, alongside several mosses and lichens. These examples show the range of plant types named in the account; they are not a complete planting schedule or evidence that every species occurs in every garden. Nor does the list mean that a small home planting of one named species can reproduce the project’s ecology. For a regional planting, New England aster is one possible point of reference, but gardeners should check local suitability and seed provenance.
What does the rooftop summit garden experiment with?
The rooftop summit garden draws on the alpine ecology of the nearby Holyoke Range. According to the project account, the roof planting experiments with lichen and moss in soil as shallow as three inches. This is a deliberate design feature, not a general claim that every roof can support the same planting or soil depth.
The rooftop garden extends the project’s regional reference upward: the landscape is not limited to ground-level woodland and meadow conditions. Its shallow-soil planting also makes horticultural choices and growing conditions part of the design’s subject. The project narrative says the team relied on bare-root and collected species. That description signals an approach to sourcing and establishing plants, but the account does not give a full procurement record, quantities, survival rates or maintenance results.
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For a construction audience, the roof is a useful reminder that a planted roof is not merely a visual finish. It is one of several distinct landscape conditions in this project, with its own planting idea and a specified shallow soil depth for some lichen and moss transplants. The source does not provide structural loading, drainage assembly, waterproofing details, irrigation strategy or a roof-maintenance schedule. Those design and construction requirements should not be inferred from the three-inch figure; it refers to soil depth for some plantings, not a complete roof specification.
How do the building and landscape support teaching?
The design team presents both the building and its landscape as teaching tools. The landscape is described as a laboratory for exhibition, detailing, site engineering, horticulture, soil science and stormwater management, with field-based learning and hands-on experience as explicit aims. Because the building houses several related academic disciplines, the project places landscape questions alongside the work of architecture, regional planning and building technology.
This is a practical form of pedagogy: a site can make design decisions legible and give students a place to encounter them in the field. A meadow, ravine, woodland garden or rooftop planting can serve as a subject for observation and discussion, while the building-landscape relationship provides a shared setting for different disciplines. That interpretation follows from the project’s stated educational aims, rather than from a published study of teaching outcomes. The ASLA project narrative does not provide student assessment data, course results or a measured account of how frequently the landscape is used for instruction.
The title’s three ideas—rewilding, experimentation and pedagogy—therefore reinforce one another. Naturalized planting creates ecological conditions to study; experimentation makes planting choices and site conditions part of the design; and the academic setting gives those choices an educational role. The landscape is not presented as a finished image that students merely look at, but as teaching infrastructure that relates design to site and material decisions.
Why does the site’s history matter?
The project account traces the design’s intellectual starting point to a walk in the woods in fall 2002. First-year master’s students from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning walked with Professor Emeritus Hal Mosher. The account says those ecology field sessions influenced the designers’ understanding of how familiar landscapes and ecologies can inform design.
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The ground also had a departmental history. ASLA’s narrative says the site held historic test plots overseen by Frank A. Waugh, the department’s first chair. It reports that the department was founded in 1903 and describes it as the second-oldest landscape-architecture program in the United States. These are statements in the project narrative, rather than independently verified institutional statistics. Their relevance to the design is that the landscape’s experimental role echoes an earlier use of the site: it is framed as a place where planting and landscape ideas can be examined, not just installed.
That continuity gives the project a stronger story than a generic “native plants” theme. The designers connect a specific site history, a student field experience and the current academic building to the landscape concept. The account does not claim that the present project recreates the historic plots; rather, it describes the past as context for a contemporary approach to ecological restoration and experimentation.
How were faculty and students involved?
STIMSON’s project account says the firm collaborated with architects, faculty and students across departments for more than a year. It describes meetings developing into charrettes and site visits becoming teaching opportunities. It also says a landscape management plan was overseen by a committee that included designers, faculty, alumni and maintenance staff.
These details matter because a landscape’s long-term use depends on more than the initial design concept. Involving maintenance staff in a management-planning committee puts ongoing care within the project’s governance story, while the involvement of faculty and students links design development to the academic community. The source does not specify committee procedures, maintenance budgets, planting replacement policies or the plan’s performance over time, so those should not be assumed.
The collaboration period—more than a year—is a reported project figure, not a universal construction duration or a measure of success. Its significance here is process: the project account describes repeated engagement through meetings, charrettes and site visits, rather than a one-time presentation of a completed design.
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What can construction teams take from this project?
The project offers a useful way to think about landscape as part of a building’s working program. In this case, the landscape connects site history, regional planting, stormwater features and teaching aims. For a construction or campus project, that framing suggests several questions to resolve early: What is the landscape meant to do beyond looking finished? Which local or historic site conditions should inform it? How will water-related features relate to the building? Who will help shape and manage the landscape after installation?
These are planning questions prompted by the project, not claims about undocumented methods used on this particular job. The source does not detail construction sequencing, contractor responsibilities, budgets, specifications, approvals or maintenance outcomes. It does support the broader point that the team treated landscape design as intertwined with building design and academic use, and that faculty, students, architects and maintenance staff were part of the collaboration or management-planning account.
It also illustrates why project goals and performance evidence should be kept distinct. A design can set out to restore a functioning ecosystem and make stormwater management a teaching subject. Demonstrating whether it achieved specific ecological or hydraulic outcomes would require appropriate measurements, none of which are supplied in the ASLA account. For owners and project teams, the lesson is not to treat a stated intention as a verified result, but to make objectives explicit and decide what evidence would show whether they are being met.
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What does the award recognize—and what does it not prove?
ASLA gave the project a 2025 Professional Awards General Design Honor Award. The recognition establishes that the project received a professional design honor. It does not, by itself, establish measured environmental performance, educational effectiveness or long-term maintenance success. The distinction is especially important because the project narrative describes ambitious ecological and teaching aims but does not publish outcome metrics.
Read on its own terms, the project is an example of landscape architecture connecting a campus building to regional ecology and institutional history. Its distinctive features include a no-lawn approach, meadows and woodland gardens, a ravine, a rooftop summit garden and a stated commitment to field-based learning. Its value as a case study lies in how those elements are brought together—and in the way the designers make the landscape’s educational purpose explicit—rather than in unsupported claims about quantified results.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the UMass Design Building?
It is on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus in Amherst, Massachusetts. The landscape project discussed here was designed for the university’s Design Building.
Which award did the UMass landscape project receive?
ASLA named it a 2025 Professional Awards General Design Honor Award recipient. The award recognizes the project in a design-awards program; it is not a published measurement of ecological performance.
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Examples include red maple, butterfly weed, New England aster, little bluestem, bearberry, balsam fir and eastern hemlock, as well as mosses and lichens. The project page’s examples should not be treated as a full planting schedule.
Does the project account prove that the landscape improved biodiversity or stormwater performance?
No. It describes restoration and stormwater management as design purposes and identifies landscape features, but it does not report measured biodiversity or stormwater outcomes.
