A Travel Prize for Early Career Landscape Architecture Professionals
The Roger Bond Martin Travel Prize is annually awarded to a landscape architect to allow early career professionals to pursue foreign or domestic travel as a means to further their professional development. It is intended to enhance the recipient's skills in observation of, participation in, and understanding of diverse cultural perspectives, differing responses to local environments, varied aesthetic expressions, and a range of technical solutions to environmental problems.
Award and Competition Schedule
The Martin Travel Prize will be awarded annually through a competition. These dates are approximate and will be adjusted as needed each year.
The exact prize amount will be determined by available funds, but is targeted to be $10,000 for travel with an additional $2,000 to support an exhibition of work from the travel prize year.
2024 Schedule:
February 28th: (Wednesday noon) Registration Opens
March 7: (Thursday Noon) Registration Closes
March 8: (Friday noon): Competition begins
Entrants sent competition details, including site, program, etc.
March 17: (Sunday midnight): Digital Submission due
March 22: Jury of Competition
March 23: Finalists contacted and asked to submit travel proposal
April 5: Final Jury and selection of winner
April 26: Winner of RBM Travel Prize announced at annual ASLA-MN Awards Gala
Roger Martin (right) in the studio.
All Sketches shown by Roger B. Martin, courtesy of the University of Minnesota Libraries Archive.
How was the Prize Established?
The Minnesota Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA-MN) and the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota established a travel prize in 2018 in honor of Professor Emeritus Roger Bond Martin, 1936-2020. The goal was to offer annual award(s) for early career practicing professional(s) in landscape architecture. Professor Martin was a prominent Minnesota Landscape Architect and founder of the University of Minnesota’s landscape architecture program. He traveled extensively for design inspiration and research and encouraged his students to do the same. To date, over 50 individuals and organizations have contributed to the prize endowment. The Martin Travel Prize endowment is managed by the University of Minnesota Foundation.
About Roger Bond Martin
Roger B. Martin, FASLA, FAAR, played a significant role in shaping the profession of landscape architecture in the second half of the 20th Century. He was educated in Horticulture at the University of Minnesota and earned his Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University in 1961, where he was mentored by the influential landscape architect, Hideo Sasaki. He subsequently won the Rome Prize in landscape architecture in 1962 and entered academia at the University of California-Berkeley following his time in Rome. He returned to Minnesota in 1966 to start a landscape architecture program at his alma mater, the University of Minnesota.
He led by example, designing important public landscapes that have endured as icons of Minnesota’s urban fabric. If you have walked the stone arch bridge, visited the Minnesota Zoo, or driven along the Minneapolis Grand Rounds, you have experienced a landscape designed, planned, or improved by Roger Martin (among hundreds of other places). He also co-founded an influential and important multi-disciplinary design firm, InterDesign, where collaboration among disciplines was emphasized in every project, a novel concept in the late 1960’s. Later, he continued his practice in partnership with Marjorie Pitz, establishing the firm Martin and Pitz, where he continued to practice until his retirement. Roger also served the profession as national president of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), in numerous roles for the Minnesota chapter of ASLA, and as president of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) throughout his career.