Susana Rojas Saviñón and Hortense Blanchard are the driving forces behind Estudio Ome, a young 5-member landscape architecture practice based out of Mexico City. Their first realized project Forest Garden immediately received LILA in the garden category. Besides that, we could easily say that Ome is LILA’s young-talent discovery of 2021. We really look forward to see what they will realize in the years to come.
Forest Garden looks like a fantastically enchanting experience with even more drama to come once the vegetation will develop further. The jury wrote:
With its lush vegetation, Forest Garden approaches the site as hybridization between the ecosystem of plants, animals and humans. It is a delicate way of setting up clearings in the forest to take advantage of resources (productive gardens, natural pools, tree regeneration) without disturbing it. Studio Ome effectively used all topographical facts, existing plants, sunlight, and other natural forces to empower a variety of programmes, needs, and, above all, experiential richness. They obviously appreciate randomness and a more relaxed approach to planting. The decision to leave the paths in the garden as informal compacted earth paths, shows a humble approach to landscaping work, which the members of the jury felt demonstrated a truly sensitive understanding of providing ‘just enough’ to meet the brief. In essence, the project emphasizes how we can leave space for nature, which is an important message going forward. Forest Garden offers a wonderfully dense atmosphere and infinite possibilities for exploration and observation.
Hortense Blanchard is a landscape architect with a degree from the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage in Versailles. She previously studied applied arts and spatial design at the École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Art Boulle in Paris. Hortense co-founded the collective Atelier Bivouac in France, and later worked in Mexico for Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura and in London with landscape architect Irène Djao Rakitine and garden designer Dan Pearson before starting her own practice.
Zaš Brezar (b. 1984, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Slovenia) is founder and editor-in-chief of Landezine. Educated as a landscape architect (University of Ljubljana), he spent several years in practice, later establishing Landezine in 2009. He is focused on the production of space, specifically mapping, tracing and interpreting the course of landscape architecture and questioning its role in society and politics of public space.
Susana Rojas Saviñón is an architect who graduated from the Universidad Iberoamericana and holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Architecture and Urban Design from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She also studied a specialization in wood design and construction at Aalto University in Finland. In 2020, she received the Young Creators scholarship from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts, and from 2019 to 2024, she was a professor of architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.
