Conroy Landscape Architecture places second in Planter Box Competition

A panel of judges reviewed twenty design submissions and selected Conroy Landscape Architecture’s Collect-Store-Release planter as the second place winner. At the live announcement on April 3, Jessica Dandridge of the Water Collaborative said that judging was close and it came down to the last judge’s vote to determine the winner.

Judges noted that the Collect-Store-Release planter would be easy to build and that it had a clean look. They appreciated that it was scalable by allowing more planters to be added over time with additional funding. The judges included landscape architects, representatives from Anova and Green Theory, an urban agriculture expert, a community sustainability organizer, and a representative from the New Orleans Office of Resilience and Sustainability.

Second prize includes a feature in Landscape Architecture Magazine and $1,000. Check out all of the entries here and see below for more detail on how the ideas for the planter came about. Thank you to all who voted!

Design Process

The concept for the planter started with thinking through the processes that create flooding in New Orleans and which inputs could be affected by the planter. New Orleans gets a lot of precipitation each year, but it frequently comes in heavy bursts during storms. I needed to find a way to capture the water and slow release it into the soil so that it could be used by the vegetable plants.

I originally thought the weeps from the reservoir into the planting soil could be used to hold up the geotextile, which keeps the soil in place as water infiltrates, but it started to be more complicated than was needed. You can see a detail on the left of the evolution from a bulky, multi-purpose opening to something that is much easier to fabricate and maintain. It is important that no special skills or training are needed to maintain green infrastructure when installed at a home or school because the infrastructure gets abandoned when the maintenance team does not have the resources (time, money, training) for specialized maintenance.

The drawing on the right shows an initial idea where reservoirs were taller than the rest of the planter so that the inlet could come from the side. This started to look too bulky and would limit access from one of the sides. Instead I went with an inlet from the top so that the reservoir top could be flush with the rest of the planter lip.

From sketchbook to final submission.