Landscape architecture is the discipline of designing outdoor environments, from gardens to territories. The term itself has roots in 18th-century British landscape painting, where “landscape” was first framed as an aesthetic category. The French designer Jean-Marie Morel (1728–1810) is credited with formulating architecte-paysagiste, first describing himself as architecte et paysagiste before the title became formalized at his death. This origin matters: landscape architecture emerged from artifice and representation, bound up with colonial and aristocratic ideals of scenery. To decolonize the field is to question these beginnings and the exclusions they carried. Since then, landscape architecture has grown into a global practice entangled with ecology, planning, infrastructure, public space, and politics. Today, the discipline continues to expand, digesting vast issues of climate crisis, biodiversity, social justice, and community life. It is no longer only about arranging scenery but about negotiating survival and meaning across scales, situating it in public perception for confrontation, reflection, and possibly - political action.
Today, the possibility arises to define a new design approach to address issues of environmental and social justice in the urban context. Based on an integrated understanding of the interdependencies involving human and environmental relations, the applied-philosophy approach for landscape architectural practices induces a paradigm shift in spatial design. Rather than applying downstream solutions to […]
The famous Bartleby quote: “I would prefer not to”, is often the paradoxical silent monologue of a professional working in development. You need the job but you don’t always believe the project’s brief is fully justified, in line with the values and needs of users, sometimes even feels forced to produce revenue which can put […]
The Dutch Landscape, The Ultimate Guide for Study, Professional and Personal Use by Alexandra Tišma[1] and Han Lörzing[2] is a “text-book” and a thorough yet very accessible guide on landscapes in the Netherlands – described from many angles and scales, historical, geographical, geological and biotic layers, cultural landscapes, from development, and planning to conservation – […]
Giovanni Aloi is an author, curator, and creator with a PhD from Goldsmiths University, focusing on natural history in art representation. His work examines depictions of flora and fauna to uncover societal values and foster shifts in these through critical reflection. Through publishing, curating exhibitions, delivering talks, and editing Antennae: The Journal of Nature in […]
The 4th Symposium of the Istituto di Studi Urbani e del Paesaggio (ISUP), titled Landscape As Architecture, took place in Mendrisio, Switzerland, from November 13 to 15, 2024. Previous editions in the series explored themes of Climate Urbanism, Scale, and Density. Out of over 250 submissions, the curators, Jonathan Sergison, João Nunes, and João Gomes […]
We spoke with OMGEVING about their participation in the international open call to devise a new masterplan in České Budějovice in Czeck Republik. What are the key features of this master plan? The zoning plan will be ambitious in its visions, flexible for the future, unambiguous and simple for decision-making in the territory, and realistic […]
The boulevard of Nice, a Christmas market in Berlin or the headquarters of a Dutch newspaper – the past decade has seen a rising number of attacks with a vehicle as a weapon. Following these attacks, city officials started to look differently at their public space. How do we keep our public spaces safe and […]
The Nuclear Chronicles: Design Research on the Landscapes of the U.S. Nuclear Highway by Andrew Madl is an exploration of unrealized U.S. government nuclear proposals and their speculative impact on the western landscape. Through fictional narratives in a graphic novel format, the book imagines cultural and ecological shifts, illustrating infrastructures and economies that might emerge […]
Almost every park needs a playground area and children’s playgrounds are one of the toughest typologies to design. The equipment available is either ugly or beyond budget, especially in the public realm. Then the programme is repetitive — poles, slides, swings, climbing walls, sandpits. For the designer to cover the developmental needs of all ages […]
Dušan Ogrin (1929-2019) was the pioneer of Slovenian landscape architecture. In 1972, he founded the Landscape Architecture programme at the University of Ljubljana. His seminal work The World Heritage of Gardens was published in 1993, so it was not too far-fetched to dedicate a book in his memory to the topic of gardens. The editors […]
Rhys Williams is the program director for landscape architecture at the University of Technology Sydney. Rhys visited the experimental garden festival in Switzerland, Lausanne Jardins. Here is his take on the context and a selection of exhibited projects.
In this new series, we wish to highlight the value of models in the widest possible sense, from images to physical representations to diagrams … It’s about models, and modalities and modulations that formed them. It investigates the role of abstraction in representation, how all sorts of models serve as a communication device and also […]
As we confront the growing ecological crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that harmonious aesthetics, designed primarily for pleasure and ease, are always the most effective mode of expression. Perhaps there is space to question whether ecological efforts demand a different aesthetic attitude, one less fixated on traditional notions of balance and spatial conformity and more open to dissensus and confrontation.
In the current debate about climate change and its disruptive effects on the health of people and ecosystems, the reclamation of the ‘right to the environment’ has gained momentum, both in theoretical accounts and in legal documents. Yet, it is useful to make a first distinction between the right to the environment and the right of the environment.
Landscape architects usually think of compact greenery as the sound buffer minimizing noise pollution but we rarely think about specifically designing with sound, acoustics of space and the soundscape present at the site of intervention. Especially in the art scene, the sonification of plants, microbes, underwater creatures and their otherwise unheard processes, gained special attention […]
Gary Hilderbrand has been teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design since 1990 and is currently the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. He is also the founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, a leading landscape architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm was established in the […]
The book by the legendary Danish landscape architect, Carl Theodor Sørensen (1893-1979), originally published in 1966, is for the first time published in English, with a foreword by Joost Emmerik and an Introduction by Lodewijk Wiegersma. Published by Blawdruk Publishers and Sonja Poll, the 39 Unusual Gardens for an Ordinary House is a landmark book […]
Bridges allow the landscape to flow underneath – or as in recent endeavours, in land bridges or ecoducts, nature flows over. In the latter, a bridge adjoins disconnected landscape portions created by cuts in the terrain. In any case, bridges form connections and links when a river or other barrier needs to be crossed. As […]
In the conversation with the landscape architecture professor, artist and writer Denise Hoffman Brandt, we speak about the morality issues attached to “doing good” while debunking Ian McHarg’s problematic position in Design with Nature. In the conversation, Brandt points out how our assumptions about nature shape our actions, why stewardship is problematic and what landscape […]
Charles Birnbaum is the CEO and founder of TCLF—The Cultural Landscape Foundation. In his work, he is a fearless advocate and activist for significant American landscape architecture sites. He was honored as a 2020 LILA Honour Award Winner for initiating and developing TCLF for over 25 years with an “innovative vision, executed with great precision, […]
Sh*tscapes is a 160-page book by London-based landscape architects Vladimir Guculak and Paul Bourel. They are also founders of studio gb, landscape architecture and design studio focused on the integration of nature into the city.
A post-industrial park is typically a sexy landmark, easy to make a story of, photogenic, and a palimpsest in itself. It presents a victory of public use over the private and industrial by opening previously closed-off spaces. A post-industrial park offers some crucial topics of remediation, adaptive reuse, and social integration, among others. For a […]
Observed as a recurring phenomenon in nature and universally interpreted, the circle stands as a fundamental geometric shape. It symbolizes various concepts such as infinity and unity, among others. In constructed environments, the focal or central point of a circle can be represented by a tree as the axis mundi, a fire pit or an […]
When we speak of Nature in cities, the question we want to stress is, is nature in cities natural or in fact an artefact? When we speak of natural processes, they of course take place but apart from spontaneous nature, left to random succession, emerging in spaces that Gilles Clément calls the third landscapes, there […]
HPO is an art and event-architecture group from Ferrara. Their work has been, among other venues, presented at Milan Design Week and 18. Venice Biennale.
In the interview, we discuss the marginal position, DIY, incomplete architecture and the importance of play.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design organized a two-day conference titled Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All? It is open to the public and available via streaming. Planetary survival in the Anthropocene crucially depends on the stewardship of resilient forest ecosystems worldwide—at the scales of wilderness, planted forests, metropolitan tracts, and the urban […]
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]
Landezine met with Taktyk at the XII Barcelona International Landscape Biennial in November 2023, at the same place where we made the first interview, seven years ago. Taktyk’s work is a collage of collaborations showing sensitivity to the site, tackling its most vulnerable spots. Sébastien Penfornis and Thierry Kandjee seek through prospective visions, on-site works […]
Günther Vogt probably needs no introduction in our profession; he has been an important practitioner for a couple of decades now, appreciated globally for his rich, non-linear and adventurous design approach. Initially, his education was more in the direction of botany. He later shifted to landscape architecture by studying in Rapperswil, Switzerland. After his study […]
Today’s most urgent topic for all professional groups everywhere must be how to give our planet and its inhabitants possibilities to survive. Never before has the professional field of landscape architects shifted its goals so quickly, as we have seen only over the last few years. The focus for landscape architecture nowadays is clearly sustainability. […]
Sarah Cowles of Ruderal presents their design for the Betania Garden near Tbilisi, Georgia, which was awarded LILA 2023 Special Mention in the Garden category. We start the discussion with an update on Arsenal Oasis, another LILA-winning project from 2021 (See the presentation). For the Betania Garden, the LILA 2023 jury wrote: At first glance, […]
The production of landscape architecture projects has been in recent years outstanding, and our entire professional community has much to be proud of. But as always, there is a flip side; like in architecture or any design discipline of the globalised and speeding-up world, we are faced with a sea of sameness. Too many buildings […]
Across the world, the risks of wildfires are increasing and expanding. Due to past and current human actions, we dwell in the age of fire – the Pyrocene – and the many challenges and climate adaptation questions it provokes. Exploring our past and current relationships with fire, this book speculates on the pyro futures yet […]
It is with sadness that we learned about the passing of renowned Canadian landscape architect Claude Cormier. In 1995, he established Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes in Montreal and, in nearly three decades, received a plethora of awards for his work, both in Canada and internationally. At Landezine, we featured a selection of projects by his […]
It is exciting to read “Blue Skies”, the new novel by T.C.Boyle, and at the same time to dedicate oneself to the opulent work of Adrian McGregor. While Boyle’s protagonists in Florida and California are at the mercy of the manifold violent effects of climate change and the reader abandons all hope after reading, the […]
Urban biodiversity? Yes, please! Nevertheless … … Due to the transitional phase of our understanding of nature in the light of the Anthropocene, there are still some important notions, contradictions and misunderstandings that need to be addressed. To do so, we will operate with terms like nature, ecology, biodiversity, landscape, and aesthetics, and we’ll focus […]
»Paradigm shift« has been, for at least a decade now, one of the most used phrases in landscape architecture. We use it mainly to address the need to focus on design with natural processes in mind. This is important as it concerns our core values, attitude towards nature, the understanding of natural processes and the […]
The AI services embedded in tools for creative profiles are developing so rapidly that this article will definitely be outdated by 6 pm tomorrow. Last year we featured a piece on Midjourney and similar platforms, and it already reads like Grandpas discussing ‘the internets’ back in the 90s. I suppose enchantment by civilisation’s technological advances […]
New Video Oral History with Julie Bargmann, Inaugural Recipient of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, released by The Cultural Landscape Foundation Eighteenth in an ongoing Pioneers of American Landscape Design® video oral history series that documents, collects, and preserves first-hand information from pioneering landscape architects The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) today announces the release […]
Alvar Aalto, one of the most important architects of modernism, was born 125 years ago. He grew up in Jyväskylä in central Finland. The opening of the Aalto2 museum hub occurred on 27 May as the highlight of the anniversary year. It combines two Alvar Aalto-designed edifices, the Museum of Central Finland (1956-61, 1991) and […]
We are thrilled to share with you the interview with LILA 2022 Honour Award winner Gilles Clément. The interview was conducted in Paris in November 2022 by Zaš Brezar and Joost Emmerik. The editors wrote in the award statement: Gilles Clément (1943) is a French landscape architect or better ‘paysagiste’, having a more garden design-related […]
We are focusing on one of the most influential landscape architecture platforms; LAE – Landscape Architecture Europe. For nearly 20 years, the triennial book has been bringing a complex multilayered reflection on the most interesting recent European projects. Prof. Dr. Dipl. -Ing. Lisa Diedrich presents the last edition titled Second Glance. She also presents the editorial […]
Rotterdam Rooftop Days (Rotterdamse Dakendagen) is an annual festival that promotes rooftop living and emphasises the potential of roofs in mitigating issues of public space, empowering communities, reducing urban heat, increasing urban biodiversity, urban food production etc. It features Knowledge Day, Rotterdam Rooftop Walk, various cultural events and, most importantly, establishes a network of permanently […]
As part of the annual IFLA Europe conference, the Finnish Landscape Architects Association MARK organised the Landscape Architects Day 2022 under the motto “Boldness and Beauty”. This alone can be called bold. MARK today has about 300 members and was formed in 1997 from the hard-won merger of the two associations SMAFLA and MAL, which […]
Dr. Stephan Brenneisen from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences has been researching urban biodiversity and roofs for over 25 years. In a video presentation, he talks about his findings. We asked him specifically to speak about what to keep in mind when designing biodiverse roofs. What can landscape architects learn from his extensive experience, […]
Landscape architects know that simply following the rules and changing spaces according to formulas and recipes is not enough to design significant landscapes, let alone change people’s perceptions of a landscape. Life is messy, and we have to invent and update rules repeatedly. This book comprises little secrets and invaluable experiences written by fifty experienced […]
