BOGL are the recipients of the 2025 LILA Office Award. They operate from offices in Copenhagen and Oslo with a steady focus on the shared grounds of urban life. Rather than seeking signature forms, the practice has built its reputation on attentiveness — to site conditions, to communities, to the long horizons of climate change, and to the immediate textures of everyday use. Their projects range from re-stitching infrastructural voids to designing small neighbourhood spaces, always balancing restraint with ambition.

A consistent thread in BOGL’s work is the rethinking of resources: leaving what is already there, transforming materials on site, and drawing craftsmanship into processes of reuse. This pragmatism is paired with curiosity — shifting between sketches, models, and on-site experiments to find forms that resonate with both human and non-human life.

In the interview, Jens Linnet, one of the founders of BOGL—short for Bang & Linnet Landscape, named after co-founder Adam Bang and himself—reflects on the evolving role of landscape architects over the past two decades, on working across scales without fixed methodology, and on how experiments in soil, water, and material cycles shape the office’s contribution to more sustainable and civic urban futures.

What changes do you observe, since you opened your practice, in demands (and opportunities) towards landscape architects and the profession to fulfil?

A lot has changed since I graduated in 2003 and since we started the office in 2009. Our profession has taken on a much more central role in urban development. Many of today’s pressing political issues—climate challenges, biodiversity, mobility, health, and social issues—are areas where landscape architects can play a direct role in shaping solutions for more sustainable cities.

Twenty years ago, we also felt we were making a difference, working with many of the same themes. But today, there is far more knowledge and awareness. What was once seen as something “nice to have” is now understood as essential to our survival and wellbeing. Climate change makes the need for transformation even more urgent. It is still vital to create beautiful, livable spaces for people, but throughout my career, the range of issues has expanded, making our work more complex, but also more relevant and meaningful.

In recent years, there has also been a growing recognition that construction—including landscape projects—has a significant climate impact. We need to reduce CO₂ emissions, which means thinking much more carefully about the resources we use and how we build and transform in responsible ways.

Your projects are close to people. In large-scale projects, you break down the scale and bring the place closer to its users, from children to insects. How do you work across scales and regions, and how do you approach the projects?

We often say that our method is not to have a method. Each project is unique, and the context, history, people, and nature demand different approaches. Sometimes we begin with reading and analysis to understand the site. Other times we dive directly into model-making—as in Farum Midtpunkt, where we worked entirely through physical models all the way up to the project proposal before digitizing it.

Switching approaches help us respond to the particular potentials of each site. Rather than relying on a fixed formula, we work with a sensory, artistic, and sometimes intuitive reading of the place—driven by curiosity and experimentation.

Looking back, though, certain patterns do emerge. Conversation and drawing are always central to us. We sketch a lot, by hand, digitally and through physical models, and the projects often take shape through a back-and-forth process—zooming out to understand the larger context, the historical, architectural, and geological lines, and zooming in to materials, tactility, and detail.

This helps us ensure that the overall concept carries through to the smallest scale, that solutions feel intimate and sensory as well as functional. The goal is for our projects to have an atmosphere that fits and elevates the site—a place that matters to someone, where people thrive and meet, and a place that can also serve as habitat for insects and birds.

In Mellemrummet, you’ve experimented and created skerries, rocky islands, that you’ve cast in situ, by pouring the concrete-earth mixture into the ground, creating rough textures, with reference to geological layer.

Ørestad in Copenhagen, where the project is located, is a newly built neighbourhood, sitting on a former seabed and common pastures. How you worked with a concept where the clear reference to the site is not apparent.

Newly built areas often lack context. When we started creating Mellemrummet, there was literally nothing there yet—no buildings, just a flat gravel surface that was supposed to become a city. So how do you work site-specifically in such a place? And what does it take?

The assignment felt rigid at first: the client wanted a playground, and the site had to accommodate a fire road. But for once, we weren’t in a rush—the project would only be built after the housing was complete. That gave us time to explore. The client was open-minded and let us challenge the very idea of what a playground could be.

We took inspiration from the fact that the area had once been coastline before it was reclaimed in the 1940s. Much of Vestamager nearby has since become valuable nature, shaped by human hands. We wanted to tell a story about the ground beneath us, about erosion, wind, and water shaping the land—forces that feel timeless and speak to us on a subconscious level.

We experimented with how to design something that could feel self-formed, yet playful. We built models, made plaster casts, and tested how to shape randomness. We drew on the local geology and its materials: chalk and limestone beneath layers of sand, gravel, and clay left by the last Ice Age.

Eventually, we decided to cast formations directly into the earth, letting the soil shape the concrete and embedding traces of the ground in the surfaces. The fire road became a flat surface near the buildings, dissolving like an eroding coastline into a small park, where the cast “skerries” form a playful landscape among trees.

In Kulbaneparken, a park sitting on top of an underground railway, a site covered with impoverished and heavy clay soil, you started to improve the conditions already two years before the project started by planting herbs. This is a great example of working closely with the client and experimenting with low-key solutions. 

When working within the field of landscape design and urban planning for that matter, time is a crucial factor. I wish more projects allowed us to work with planting, management, and natural growth processes over longer periods—to see how places are used and to adjust along the way. Sadly, this is rare.

At Kulbaneparken the challenges were severe: heavy clay soil on top of a tunnel where nothing could grow, and no budget to replace the soil. So, we began by planting biennial herbs with deep roots to improve porosity before the actual project started. Later, we worked with different planting methods familiar from open landscapes in order to improve the soil: tall grass areas, shrubs, dense shelterbelts, and forest planting with many small bare-root trees.

We learned that patience pays off—but also that continuous follow-up is needed. Difficult sites demand experimentation, as well as close collaboration with municipalities and their maintenance teams. It’s essential to keep trying new methods to see how we can green our cities despite tough conditions.

You also aim to design climate-proof cities, designed with nature, resulting not only in resilience but also in greater well-being. In Scandinavia, there is a big problem with flooding, but also with droughts. How do you approach specific conditions, how far into the future must you plan?

Climate change is progressing faster than expected, which means our planning horizons are constantly shifting. If you look at recommendations for flood protection, they’ve risen dramatically in just the past 20 years as risks have increased.

In many projects, we design for a 100-year event, projected 100 years into the future. In critical areas, such as infrastructure, we sometimes plan for a 1,000-year event. For example, Copenhagen Airport on Amager is protected to 4.5 meters above sea level.

This raises important questions: do we retreat and adapt to water, or do we block it with walls and dikes? The answer will likely be a mix, tailored to each site’s conditions. Denmark is a coastal nation, much of it low-lying. The great challenge will be finding solutions that protect us while still preserving—and ideally enhancing—the qualities of our coastal landscapes, so we don’t end up hiding the country behind walls.

We are currently working on developing a (as much as possible) regenerative approach to coastal protection in urban areas, based on site-specific, nature-based solutions and the transformation of what already exists. In other words, we aim to safeguard both coastlines and human settlements in ways that not only create greater value for people but also help restore habitats that are at risk of disappearing due to rising sea levels.

Together with Rambøll, we have detailed a vision project that illustrates how this can be done through hybrid solutions—where aquafarming, recreation, wildlife and attractive housing areas can coexist despite rising waters.

In the keynote lecture at the IFLA World Congress 2023, you put great focus on water management and tools the landscape architecture uses to work with the climate, but what is admirable is the recycling process you have ingrained in your practice. You work as “scavengers”, picking up the glass, paving and steel before it gets recycled. By this, you move the money allotted for resources and hand it over to craftsmanship. Please explain more, how this practice transforms your projects and the work with local communities.

We try to move away from the “buy new, throw away, buy again” mentality toward a circular approach. First, we leave as much as possible in place. Then we transform materials on site. If more is needed, we look for reused materials nearby. Only as a last resort do we buy new.

This requires careful analysis and documentation of existing materials, so the design can adapt to what is already there. It also demands open dialogue with clients and users, since it challenges expectations about aesthetics, design, and even operations.

Although reused materials may be cheap, more time is needed for craftsmanship, meaning that it’s not necessarily a cheaper solution. We do experience though, that the use of these materials results in projects with an appealing tactility—projects crafted with tangible care, while engaging local communities, making up for the costs. Craftspeople enjoy the challenge too—whether it’s blacksmiths reshaping old steel or masons building walls and furniture from old paving stones.

We often build 1:1 mock-ups to test solutions, address concerns, and adjust before final construction. This makes it easier to show residents what we mean—something drawings alone can’t convey. At Krakas Plads, for example, residents were initially skeptical, worried that reused materials would look worn and ugly. Over time, their perception shifted completely. Now they’re proud of the project, seeing it as an architectural upgrade to their neighborhood—unique to their place and unlike anywhere else.

Finally, what are your plans for the office?

Our goal is to continue developing meaningful projects and investigate new ways of working within our field that combine beauty, sustainability, and resilience—projects that make a real difference to people and to the environment. Now, we’re based in Copenhagen and Oslo, and we also work in Sweden and Central Europe, but we stay open to the world – if a project feels right, matches our values, and lets us make a difference, we go for it.