Hoosier Commons Campus Promenade Wins 2026 INASLA Professional Design Award

Troyer Group accepts the 2026 INASLA Award in the Unbuilt Works category for Hoosier Commons Campus Promenade.

We’re proud to share that Troyer Group received a 2026 INASLA Professional Design Award in the Design – Unbuilt Works category for Hoosier Commons Campus Promenade, our conceptual master plan for the Arboretum pedestrian corridor at Indiana University Bloomington. The award is presented annually by the Indiana Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (INASLA) to recognize outstanding landscape design across the state. Our team is honored to see this project stand among this year’s winners.

Reimagining a Corridor Campus Users Rely On Every Day

The site sits along the west edge of the Cox Arboretum, linking Tenth Street and Seventh Street through the cultural heart of campus. For nearly a quarter mile, it carries a steady flow of students, faculty, and visitors between residence halls, academic buildings, and destinations like the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Woodburn Hall, and the Metz Grand Carillon. Over the decades the pathway grew organically as surrounding buildings and landscapes changed around it. This left an inconsistent aesthetic and a route that, while functional, felt more like a backdoor through campus than a front door to it.

Beneath the surface, the corridor is also one of the busiest infrastructure spines on campus, carrying stormwater systems and broadband utilities that serve the surrounding district. Any design solution had to work as hard below grade as it does above it, balancing infrastructure needs with a genuine sense of place.

A Design Grounded in Student Voices and Campus History

Before a single concept sketch was drawn, our team partnered with Indiana University’s School of Public Health-Bloomington to build a research-driven understanding of how people actually use the space. Two classes of students helped gather daily user interviews, met with faculty and student groups, and mapped what they called “happiness assets,” the places along the corridor where people feel a sense of belonging.

That engagement surfaced a clear and unexpected finding: students felt a strong emotional connection to the historic remnants of the old Tenth Street Stadium. Built in 1925 as the original Memorial Stadium, the venue was home to IU football until 1959 and later hosted the Little 500 bicycle race before it was demolished in 1982. Rather than treat that history as a footnote, we made it central to the design.

“The Cove” opens the promenade into a plaza centered on the Metz Grand Carillon, expanding native plantings and the tree canopy around the Arboretum’s historic gateway pillars.

The Promenade Concept

Hoosier Commons Campus Promenade widens and realigns the corridor into a sequence of distinct, purposeful spaces we referred to as “rooms” during design development, including a Tunnel of Trees that compresses the view before releasing it into an open plaza framed by the Metz Grand Carillon, a shaded Cove for gathering, a Display area highlighting scholarship from the School of Public Health, a Theater Terrace for outdoor classes, and anchor plazas at both the north and south ends of the site.

A symbolic paving pattern inspired by the Little 500 race track runs the length of the corridor, weaving the site’s athletic history directly into the ground plane and giving the promenade a unifying identity, an idea the team sketched out early on and nicknamed the “Red Ribbon.” Raised planters protect the utilities below while adding structure and greenery above, native plantings expand stormwater capacity and habitat value, and integrated lighting reshapes the experience of the corridor after dark, reinforcing sightlines to the Carillon and improving safety along the route.

The resulting plan supports the university’s broader goals, including IU’s Student Life Strategic Plan and Climate Action Plan, by creating outdoor spaces for informal learning and connection while managing stormwater more sustainably across a historically significant part of campus.

What This Recognition Means

The INASLA Professional Design Awards celebrate work that advances the practice of landscape architecture throughout Indiana, and the Design – Unbuilt Works category specifically honors visionary planning and design work that has not yet been constructed. This recognition affirms an approach we bring to every campus project: pairing rigorous engagement and technical infrastructure planning with a design that gives a place real identity.

We’re grateful to Indiana University Bloomington for the opportunity to reimagine this corridor, and to INASLA for recognizing the work. We look forward to seeing Hoosier Commons Campus Promenade move toward construction and become a place students are proud to call their own.

Interested in how Troyer Group approaches campus planning and landscape architecture? Contact our team to talk about your next project.