Art is the field of creative practices that produce images, objects, performances, and experiences. It has always been a space for questioning, reflection, and invention. Art has often been ahead of design in thinking ecology, social practices, and politics of public space. It holds conceptual frameworks and concrete cases that can unsettle and inspire. For landscape architects, art is a resource: not to imitate but to study, to learn from how artists reflect the past, critique the present, and imagine possible futures. As it can act as a laboratory of society soaked in experimental approaches, ideas can be observed, already in motion through artistic practices.
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.
Growing up on a farm in Tyrol, surrounded by repetitions of natural processes to which rituals and traditions attune, Weinberger developed an understanding of the nature–culture relationship observed from the periphery.
In this article, we enter into a conversation with Danilo Milovanović (DNLM), an artist based in Slovenia, whose practice in public space leaves behind socio-political and environmentally engaged commentaries. His interventions open up civic debate and make visible the tensions that shape contemporary urban life. Trained in the visual arts, Milovanović positions his practice outside […]
On a mild evening last April, Room 304 in Pratt Institute’s architecture school, Higgins Hall—an oddly grandiose double-height classroom space with a view of the Manhattan skyline—is packed. The Landscape Seminar Series—launched in 2022 in conjunction with Pratt’s Master of Landscape Architecture program—has invited the iconic land artist and activist Mary Miss to speak as […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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.
Domesticated and genetically engineered organisms are usually overlooked by natural museums and institutions for cultural history. There is no space for artifacts such as dogs, chickens and corn. The Center for PostNatural History is the sequel to the natural history museum, and takes agriculture’s evolution as a starting point. CPNH focuses on the deliberate alterations […]
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 […]
Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices. Eichner is […]
Caio Reisewitz has created an artistic intervention in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, titled “Suspendre el Cel”. To Suspend the Sky is the artist’s reference to activists shamans Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak, alluding to Indigenous practices and beliefs of Amazonian people that the earth is made out of the sky, so the sky […]
This summer, throughout Switzerland, you can attend the curated observation of the ongoing phenomenon of glaciers melting. Art installations, performances and exhibitions, scattered about the Alpine landscape, are informed by this exclusive moment in climate history that will forever change our landscapes. The melting progresses with the proportion of the loss of albedo surface. Although […]
Landezine talks to Andre Dekker, who, together with Ruud Reutelingsperger, Lieven Poutsma and Geert van de Camp, forms a public art collective Observatorium. In the video, Dekker gives a 30-minute-long presentation of some of Observatorium’s most recent and most important works. Their artworks traverse the realms of urban planning, landscape design, architectural innovation, and artistic […]
Soundscapes The experience of silence and sound in the landscape International Landscape Study Days Thursday 22-Friday 23 February 2024, Treviso and online Friday 16 February 2024, from 5 pm, online preview The 20th edition of the International Landscape Study Days, organised by Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, will be held in Treviso (at the Palazzo Bomben […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In this essay, Zaš Brezar writes about the role of urban roofs in our collective memory. Illustrating the meaning of roofs through a selection of cultural references from films and music. The article is a part of Living Roofs focus on Landezine that is going on in October and November 2022.
