Stewardship Excellence Award: Peter L. Schaudt
Peter L. Schaudt was selected as a recipient of TCLF's 2015 Stewardship Excellence Award in recognition of his long-standing leadership and collaborative efforts to achieve holistic and thoughtful stewardship through the practice of landscape architecture. For more than two decades, first as principal of Peter Lindsay Schaudt Landscape Architecture, and then of Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects, Schaudt’s thoughtful and sensitive work has led to renewed and revitalized nationally significant landscapes—while practicing what he referred to in his campus master plan at UNC in 2008 as “The Dignity of Restraint.”
Schaudt's work was rooted equally in the historic preservation and design camps without being labeled “preservationist.” He moved effortlessly from Picturesque, Prairie, and Beaux-Arts styles (e.g. the garden at Midway Plaisance in Washington Park) to Modernist insertions that were always apt, beautifully detailed, and grown out of an analytical framework that valued the historic design intent as much as the 21st-century visitor (e.g. the campus landscape at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Daley Center Plaza in Chicago, and Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto).
In both his work and his public engagement, Schaudt carried the torch for the profession, illuminating and extolling the contributions of his mentors Dan Kiley (with whom he worked for three years, including on the seminal NationBank Plaza in Tampa, Florida) and Joe Karr (who encouraged him to first study landscape architecture), as well as many of the profession’s pioneers who shaped the landscape of Chicago, including Olmsted, Jensen and Caldwell. In all of this work, Schaudt instilled value for his predecessors' collective contributions, serving as an interpreter of their work while shepherding their legacies forward through his own interventions.
Schaudt passed away unexpectedly on July 19, 2015. This award is presented posthumously.
