Landscape Architecture Student Sam Nash Riggs Wants to Design a More Colorful, Inclusive World
Sam Nash Riggs is pursuing a Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Georgia. She is the 2024 winner of the Kenneth R. Brooks MLA Research Scholarship and a 2024 LAF Olmsted Scholar.
You could say Sam Nash Riggs’ path to landscape architecture began with behavioral neuroscience, but it took her 11 years after finishing an undergraduate degree in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics to start a Master of Landscape Architecture. Along the way, her undergraduate fascination with the way our brains react to spaces and affect our behavior has evolved into a passion for understanding how designed spaces shape behavior and create feelings of belonging and inclusion.
After finishing her undergraduate degree, Sam took MCAT prep courses, thinking she’d apply to medical school and perhaps become a neurosurgeon. Something wasn’t clicking for her, however, and she decided to take time off from that career path and reevaluate. Working in restaurants to pay the bills, she started gardening to satisfy her creative side. This sparked a passion for flowers and their cultivation, which led her to a job at a Garden*Hood, a nursery in Atlanta, Georgia. At Garden*Hood, Sam found herself drawn to the colorful nursery signage. She started making the signs to memorize the details of each plant and its needs. She started studying horticulture and then design to better serve the nursery’s landscape architect and designer clients.
Sam’s self-directed learning paid off when she was hired as a horticulturalist at a landscape design firm. There, she soon started expanding to design projects as well and started planning her next career as a landscape architect. But it took a while to find her way back to school; Sam and her husband—a registered architect—had two kids, and school kept getting pushed off a bit longer, but when the time was right she enrolled at the University of Georgia to start her MLA.
As one of the older students in her cohort, Sam feels she’s coming into her MLA with a lot more confidence than she would have had five or ten years earlier. She commutes a long way to her campus, has had to balance her responsibilities as a parent with coursework, and isn’t interested in slowly making her way into the discipline after she graduates (she wants to hit the ground running). All these considerations have led her to be laser focused on what she wants to get out of her time at the University of Georgia and how she wants to launch her landscape architecture career upon graduating.
Her vision includes a professional community, so she’s taken initiative as a leader in her program, going beyond her course requirements to build community among her cohort and networking nationally as a LABash 2024 conference speaker. One initiative she’s particularly proud of is increasing diverse resources for design students in the UGA College of Environment and Design’s Owens Library. She curated a list of 16 books by Black and BIPOC designers and worked with one of the Owens librarians to submit a request to the dean. The full list was approved for purchase, and Sam made a display (pictured below) to highlight them in the library.
Sam’s drive and her leadership within her program at UGA led faculty to nominate her as their 2024 LAF Graduate Olmsted Scholar, but it’s her thesis topic that won her the 2024 the Kenneth R. Brooks MLA Research Scholarship, which is awarded to an MLA student with an outstanding proposal for thesis or capstone research that contributes to the body of knowledge needed to advance the practice of landscape architecture.
Sam’s thesis is “The Power of Pigments: Expressing Black Identity Through Color in the Built Environment.” She’s interested in the ways color in landscape conveys cultural symbolism. “Black culture,” she writes, “is rich with bold and vibrant colors and patterns, joyous and meaningful celebrations, and songs that share history, hope, and resilience. However, these expressive forms are not strongly represented in the built environment.” Her research seeks to answer two key questions. First, what colors and color palettes are prominently used in and recognizable in representing Black identity and culture? And second, how does the presence or absence of culturally significant colors in the built environment affect the sense of identity of Black individuals within those spaces? Her ultimate goal is to strategically use color in creating urban spaces that reflect, represent, and empower the Black community.
Reflecting on how receiving this scholarship helps, Sam says the financial aspect is, of course, helpful in paying the bills while she focuses on her research, but she also sees how this type of recognition is personally and professionally validating. The award will help her establish herself sooner in the landscape architecture world and lends credibility to her research topic.
LAF scholarship applications open each fall with a Feb 1 deadline. Learn more about available scholarships here.
To stay up to date on news about LAF scholarship opportunities as well as our other programs, events, and funding opportunities, subscribe to LAF emails.
