Dept.

The jury valued Prairie Plots for turning the university campus into a living laboratory of landscape experimentation, eco-cultural awareness, and environmental literacy. The project gives agency to the landscape by positioning the institution as an enabler of ecological practices that are often politically, culturally, or operationally difficult to introduce in public or urban settings. Its importance lies in replacing the conventional lawn, the defining image of the academic campus, with a process-based landscape rooted in the native prairie ecosystems of the Texas Gulf Coast. In doing so, it redefines maintenance as ecological stewardship, embracing disturbance regimes, such as low-intensity fire (cold-fire), that were practised for millennia by Native American communities and fundamental to maintaining these ecosystems.

The project is not merely anti-lawn; it argues for a more productive ground, shaped by different forms of maintenance, ecological succession, soil improvement, endemic species and reduced chemical inputs. The first prescribed burn on the Rice campus is especially significant, bringing fire back into the urban environment as a legitimate tool of care, nutrient cycling and prairie management. Prairie Plots also works as a pedagogical landscape. Students, faculty and the wider community encounter seeds, soils, sprouting, maintenance and species change directly, rather than as abstract ecological ideas. At a larger scale, the project contributes to the rethinking of prairie habitats, among the most diminished ecosystems in the United States, and points toward forms of land care outside the conventions of ornamental campus landscape and agro-industrial production.