Shane Coen, file photo by David Brewster, Star Tribune

Coen + Partners, a Minneapolis landscape architecture firm, has won a National Design Award from Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.

Established in 2000 by the White House Millennium Council, the National Design Awards promote good design as a "humanistic tool in shaping the world." Recipients will be honored at a gala dinner October 15 in New York City.

The New York-based museum announced 11 award winners including a posthumous Lifetime Achievement citation to Michael Graves who died March 12, age 80. Graves is best known for bringing high style and elegant fuction to a series of popular, low-priced products that he produced for Target, Corp. Graves also designed The Target Wing, a $50 million quasi-neoclassical addition to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts that opened in 2006.

Founded by Shane Coen in 1991, Coen + Partners is a 12 person firm that prides itself on collaborative, environmentally sensitive landscapes using native plants. It has worked in more than 20 states and 10 countries. Locally it is best known for the prairie landscaping at the Jackson Meadow housing project near Marine on St. Croix and for terraced landscaping at the Hazelden Foundation in Center City.

The firm's present projects include redesigning Nicollet Mall with James Corner Field Operations, redoing a plaza at the Department of Transportation in St. Paul, and working on the Minnesota Senate Building at the State Capitol in St. Paul. Elsewhere its projects include Washington Square Park in Kansas City, Missouri and a masterplan for the King Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

STAR TRIBUNE, Star Tribune

Additional 2015 National Design Awards and their recipients are:

Director's Award: Jack Lenor Larsen

Design Mind: Rosanne Haggerty

Corporate & Institutional Achievement: Heath Ceramics

Architecture Design: MOS Architects

Communication Design: Project Projects

Fashion Design: threeASFOUR

Interaction Design: John Underkoffler

Interior Design: Commune'

Product Design: Stephen Burks