ASLA Oregon has recognized Walker Macy’s Mike Zilis with a 2024 Distinguished Practitioner Award. This award is given to an outstanding landscape architect to recognize a career that has made a profound impact on the profession.
Through his 42-year career and his leadership role at Walker Macy since 1987, Mike has substantially influenced generations of landscape architects in Oregon and beyond, and has tangibly advanced the quality of communities throughout the western states with exemplary landscape architecture and urban design. Mike is recognized for his rich understanding of urban form and a dedication to the social, environmental, economic and aesthetic benefits that design can provide.
Notably, he has been a leader in landscape architectural design, planning and in urban design throughout the Northwest. He has actively participated in multi-faceted projects that have taken years of community engagement, iterative design, and public investment to fully realize. Through these long-term efforts he has demonstrated a deft ability to think at both the granular scale of human experience and at the large scale of cities’ evolution. He has focused his career on meaningful collaborations with clients, teams, and communities to create vital public open spaces. Mike is known for bringing an insightful, hands-on design approach to develop places that have transformed waterfronts, downtowns, educational institutions and neighborhoods. As a designer, he leads teams to seek creative solutions that are rooted in the special qualities of place, environment, and community. As a principal and partner of Walker Macy, Mike has mentored scores of landscape architects and has helped to facilitate the successful transition of Walker Macy to a new generation of leaders and the establishment as a women-led company.