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.
Landscape architecture should engage intensively with conviviality—it has the capacity to unify many issues in current theoretical debates and connect the discipline to the global network of the conviviality movement.
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, […]
An essay on how we push animals into playing roles — from fables and films to renders of biodiversity and art — tracing how these projections tame, abstract, or estrange, and how synurbists and artists unsettle the human–animal divide.
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 […]
It was 2 AM, and I was still scrolling through thousands of digitized drawings in the Olmsted archive on Flickr. Six hours in, my avocado toast sat half-eaten, but I couldn’t pull myself away. These hand-drawn plans were so much more alive than the sterile digital renderings that I have gotten so used to seeing […]
I have spent the last two weeks conducting field research at a large music festival located in the interior of Portugal. Every day, I would wake up in my tiny tent and walk into a stunning landscape. Walking around the grounds of the festival every morning was my favorite activity, indulging in the lake around […]
Mental health disorders such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and paranoid schizophrenia affect masses of people worldwide. These conditions not only challenge individuals but also deeply affect their relatives and communities. While clinical treatments remain essential, there is increasing recognition of the therapeutic role landscapes can play in supporting mental health recovery. Historically, nature […]
Tempelhofer Feld, one of Europe’s largest urban open spaces, has long been a focal point of debate, particularly since its closure as an airport in 2008. Over the years, the site has sparked public protests, legal disputes, and heated discussions about its future. Now, after a highly anticipated international competition, the winning proposals have been […]
How do we represent territories whose histories, economies, and ecologies have been shaped by centuries of extraction, yet are still often perceived as peripheral or empty? 1. Introduction In his book Norrland, journalist Po Tidholm opens with a poem that captures a long-standing reality: northern Sweden has long been a site of resource extraction— iron […]
As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of what was formerly called ‘the European Landscape Convention’ spare a thought for upcoming generations: Generation Z and especially Generation Alpha are having a difficult time. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, between the perils of the real world and the dangers of life in […]
Anna Thurmayr and Dietmar Straub, operating from Winnipeg, Canada, approach landscape architecture less as a matter of monumental authorship and more as a form of quiet insurgency. Their practice resists spectacle, embracing instead small yet resonant gestures, collective processes, and deep attentiveness to context—whether planting 20,000 crocuses into a lawn or constructing an ephemeral Snow […]
Lars Hopstock’s Idyll and Ideology: Hermann Mattern and the Landscape to Live In is a heavy-lifter historiographic study. Published by Jovis in 2024, the volume arrives as a carefully crafted and tactile artefact in Jagd style, with hunting-green viscose-flocked covers reminiscent of a mounted trophy. Indeed, Hopstock has ventured deeply into archival “woods”, emerging with meticulous evidence and nuanced narratives around Hermann Mattern (1902–1971), one of Germany’s most significant yet contentious landscape architects. His expansive research not only sets the bar incredibly high for any similar undertakings but vividly frames Mattern’s navigation between aesthetic idyll and loaded ideology.
Led by James A. Lord and Roderick Wyllie, Surfacedesign, Inc. is a San Francisco–based landscape architecture and urban design studio known for bold, material-driven work that blends architectural clarity with a sculptural, site-attuned sensibility. From public parks and international airports to intimate gardens and experimental studios, their projects push against the conventions of globalised sameness, […]
Dr. Anette Freytag is a relentless researcher, moving between academia, activism, and public engagement. She taught at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, and the Technical University of Innsbruck before joining Rutgers University, where she is the Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. Freytag […]
The volume On the Side of Fire. Rites, approaches and cultivation practices in landscapes is the twenty-first edition in the “Memorie” series by the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche (FBSR), a Treviso-based international centre for landscape studies and research, founded by Luciano Benetton in 1987, focusing on history, geography, natural and cultural heritage. Opening space for […]
The Landscape Architecture Europe Foundation (LAE) has published the 7th edition of its book series, titled Full of Life. With each issue released triennially, the editorial board delves into high-quality landscape architecture projects, tracing the evolution of this young profession and highlighting the significance of addressing climate and social issues while crafting beautiful spaces. The […]
Despite ambitious sustainability frameworks, current modes of urban waterfront redevelopment tend to reinforce existing or create new socio-spatial divides in the city. Although the projects regard urban water as a public good, it is oftentimes the most privileged groups that get to enjoy the improved environmental amenities and reap their benefits, at the expense of […]
The book, Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley, by Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen, came out last week, published by Harvard University Design Press. It is an enormous study, partly conducted through the Thinking Through Soil studio course at the GSD, Department of Landscape Architecture, and with the help of the […]
The first parks open to the public in Western society date back to the late 18th century, with the Englischer Garten in Munich (1789), named by the renowned Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, followed by Maksimir Park in Zagreb (1794). Birkenhead Park, described as a “People’s Garden” by Olmsted and designed by Joseph Paxton in Liverpool […]
Landscapes of Retreat, a book by Rosetta S. Elkin, is informed by land-based practice, observation, and paying close attention to the multifaceted changes occurring in landscapes and their impact on communities. The second edition of this award-winning book (originally published in 2022), which gained considerable attention within the landscape architecture community, has been released this […]
Soil is a strange soup of minerals, organic matter, gases and liquids, bound to mediate between lower and higher strata. While one can think of soil eating as bizarre, one can also imagine taking minerals in a form of a pill and why one wouldn’t eat forest soil or soils outside polluted areas? It gives […]
TU Berlin presents its new Chair ‘Entwerfen von Landschaften im Anthropozän/ Designing Landscapes in the Anthropocene’, or ÉLAN for short, headed by Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich since April 2025. The name says it all: Rather than seeing the Anthropocene as the antechamber to apocalypse, for the detrimental changes wrought by human activities on all things […]
Cobe is on the side of the “progressives” in the profession, working at one of the most urban-eco-technologically progressive centres worldwide, Copenhagen in Denmark. Their merging of cross-disciplinary work into a “meaningful whole”, creating interfaces at different scales of contact, pushing the boundaries of engagement – from the threshold of their office, into the neighbouring […]
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 […]
When I walk in the city center, in parks, I feel like I’m in a kind of theater. The fact that these environments have been deliberately designed for me to find them beautiful is, to me, a problem.
But when you walk along an infrastructure, you know you’re in reality. You’re seeing the world as it truly is, as it appears to you. I believe landscape architects shouldn’t focus on cultural aesthetics. Instead, they should work with corporeal aesthetics—something much harder to grasp. Our job is not to create new beauty. Our job is to reveal the beauty that already exists. That’s a completely different approach.
With a highly influential line of land artists creating large-scale earthworks, especially in the North American deserts, one asks: “Where did land art go?” Did works like The Lightning Field (1977) by Walter De Maria, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) conclude with Michael Heizer’s City—a project started in 1970 […]
Reports of global warming, biodiversity loss, rising anti-democratic states, heatwaves, wars, and sea-level rise are enough to make anyone discouraged. In these times, hope is crucial—it’s the difference between envisioning a positive future and resigning to the present. Hope drives action, while hopelessness paralyzes. It rejects the status quo and aspires for change, making it vital for progress. Hope can grow and strengthen, but it can also fade.
Exploring the interplay between low-res design and the transience of landscapes, this essay foregrounds the notion of resolution, enquiring about a dynamic interaction with landscapes in flux.
The book reads like a crime novel for landscape architects. It contains much of the stuff we don’t dare to look into, true – mostly because forests fall under the domain of forestry. Designed Forests: A Cultural History uncovers human entanglements with forests as a design metaphor through a series of gripping stories Dan Handel researched in serious depth, not leaving room for much romance. Taking us on a global journey through projects that involve forests as a point of departure, Handel catches us in our preconceived ways of thinking, traversing the undergirding ideas, cutting to the stem of those lines of thought. The book is not an answer to what a forest is, yet we might get an idea of how forest metaphor gets instrumentalized in discourse in spatial design practices and what this metaphor lacks.
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 […]
Mnemosyne walks on a Forest Wall What if rural areas took center stage in the movement for resilient, secure communities—getting the same attention as urban environments? What if seawalls and groynes weren’t just lifeless barriers but thriving ecosystems, forests, walking routes for storytelling, art trails and canvases for culture and nature? The growing impact of […]
In this next episode of our series on models as a key tool for communication and exploration, we present the Danish office Cobe, renowned for its terrain and object modulations. The undulating landscapes and folded facades create a dynamic interplay of convex and concave forms, shaping both the skyline and the experience of space with […]
Converting grey infrastructure into green socialstructure leads to more inclusive, adaptable, and environmentally resilient public spaces that serve both ecological and social functions. The benefits extend beyond aesthetics – these transformations drive economic growth, improve public health, and mitigate the effects of climate change.
So, the real question is not whether cities can do this. The question is: Why aren’t they?
Andrew Grant founded his practice, Grant Associates in 1997, which grew into an international design studio with offices in Bath and Singapore. His most significant work, Gardens by the Bay, won the Building Project of the Year Award at the 2012 World Architecture Festival and continues to be one of the most visited places designed […]
The book Forest Urbanisms brings together underlying ideas, the concept of forest urbanism, and global practices and research that engage with forests through a critical and nuanced lens. Using the world is forest as the guiding principle, the authors put the forest in a central role of the spatial organization across regions, scales and quantities – from a solitary tree to an interplay of buildings and trees. This expanding notion of forest expects new morphologies and typologies of forest urbanism. The authors open the controversies regarding humankind’s relations to forests and offer thinking tools past the greenwashing paradigms.
The interview with Chloe and Michael Humphreys focuses on the work of The Landscape Studio. They began working in Nairobi in 2014 and in the years, their practice produced numerous private and public projects across Africa, that in essence and with minimal material means, embody the beauty of the locality. Embracing constraints is their design […]
Battlefield project started when artist Gabriella Hirst discovered a rose cultivar named after the WWI battle in France in 1916, the ‘Hell of Verdun’. The act of commemorating the loss of 300,000 lives by cultivating the plant, made Gabriella think of ways the plants unknowingly contribute to shaping narratives of war and destruction. Since 2013, […]
Forests are ecosystems, usually acknowledged as spaces with the least human intervention, however, not many of us have been in touch with a virgin forest and its feralness. For most, forest means recreational or urban woods in the vicinity where we stroll and unwind or a mountain forest where we hike or climb. People growing […]
The landscape architecture profession, young as it seems, is backed up by a long line of planners, practitioners, and academics, connected in chambers, networks and local contexts. However, landscape architecture still sees a problem with the profession’s visibility. This is contrary to Susan and Geoffrey Jelicoe’s prediction in 1975 that: “the world is moving into […]
Collectively, all humans experience 8 billion days in 24 hours. That is about 22 million years lived in one day.
When one starts to think about time in that way, it seems inevitable to envision the collective impact of human life on Earth.
The inaugural lecture, given by Joost Emmerik when he assumed his position as Head of Landscape at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2022. The text particularly excels in embedding doubt into the teaching process. It is the doubt about nature, our entanglement with it, and the values and politics that drive the design process. It is about passing knowledge to others and questioning it meanwhile – a much more pertinent and productive teaching paradigm for times of uncertainties and change.
Kamel Louafi is a landscape architect with a touch of classic grandiose. His work is instilled with a perennial feel that abides by the expressive tools of the visual art theory yet includes a strong design voice of personal poetics. The difference Kamel Louafi creates, the un-anonymity of his work could be even marked as […]
Daniel Ganz is a founder of a renowned office based in Zurich, Ganz Landschaftsarchitekten, whose work received many recognitions by opening the field into diverse directions resulting in unusual designs. In 2021, the monograph Ganz – Contemporary Swiss Landscape Architecture was published, presenting the reader with 10 works outlined by key themes like pleasure, labour, […]
“The tool is trying to counter the friction of power and reposition power as cooperation and co-creation early on to generate mature design briefs from the get-go. And that the process of participating for all parties is not a drudgery of boredom, frustrations and resulting anger or dismissal of feedback loops”
With our 21st century attentions challenged by endless streams of information on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, as well as blockbuster films supercharged by quick cuts and loads of special effects, Roundhay Garden Scene is improbably well suited for our age: who really has the time to spend more than 1 or 2 seconds on any one piece of visual content?2
Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire, an 8-hour long, black-and-white movie featuring a single shot of New York City’s Empire State Building, offers a useful counterpoint.
In 2014, in its first summer of opening, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) had a problem with audience diversity. Although residents in the park catchment were ethnically and racially mixed, its usership was disproportionately white. My doctoral research1 found that the predominantly white Anglo-European park designers and client team had created a landscape which did […]
This article by Kelly Shannon and Donielle Kaufman was first published on 9 January 2018. With the recent fires around Los Angeles, we are bringing it into focus again in early 2025 as it sheds light on processes and hidden corners of the context that brought about California’s ‘wildfire epidemic’.
… what is the stage of AI in and outside the profession and discipline of landscape architecture? Many firms are now incorporating Generative AI into their workflow. Firms such as SWA have been able to fund research fellows exploring generative AI. Anecdotally, I have learned that other firms have similar internal initiatives. One trend is using LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models), a lightweight training technique that can “fine-tune” one’s Stable Diffusion models to generate images in a certain style.
