Phenomenology

Phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl and extended by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others, investigates the structures of lived experience. It resists abstraction by returning to “the things themselves,” analyzing how world and consciousness interrelate. In landscape and architecture, phenomenology emphasizes embodied perception: light, texture, sound, movement, and atmosphere. It reframes design as staging of experiential horizons rather than merely formal composition. Phenomenology’s raw poetics lies in showing how environments are disclosed through dwelling and attention.

In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to […]

As part of the broader philosophical movement of speculative realism, OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) directly challenges the long-established belief that reality is always determined solely through human perception. Instead, the father of OOO, philosopher Graham Harman, argues that all objects—human and non-human, natural and artificial—exist independently of our subjective conceptualizations. To understand the radical nature and […]

BASE is a France-based studio known for its out-of-the-box thinking and unexpected design choices, often introducing challenges that can be overcome through play. Encountering an obstacle in a public space—one that invites engagement and risk-taking—creates a tension that can lead to moments of joyful liberation. A key aspect of BASE’s approach is putting trust in […]

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 […]

“Excerpts from a project on Trees and Beasts” Denise Hoffman Brandt© Denise Hoffman What do we actually mean when we talk about nature? As a professor in a discipline that since the early 1970s has, mostly, claimed to practice “design with nature”—referencing Ian McHarg’s book (1969) of that title—that’s a question I have often asked. […]

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 […]

Klaske Havik is associate professor of Architecture, Methods&Analysis at Delft University of Technology. She has developed a distinct research approach relating questions about the use, experience and imagination of place, to literary language. Her book Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (2014) proposes a literary approach to architecture, landscape and urbanism, introducing the three notions […]

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