Representation in landscape architecture refers to the drawings, models, and digital renderings through which ideas are communicated and tested. These mediations are never neutral; they frame perception, value, and authority within the design process. Philosophically, representation invokes debates on whether images capture reality or construct it, from Plato’s suspicion of mimesis to poststructuralist critiques of signification. In landscape discourse, representation both enables collective negotiation and risks reducing complex ecologies to surface images. To question representation is to ask how landscapes are imagined, translated, and legitimized before they are built.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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.
… 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.
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 […]
Dr. Jevgeniy Bluwstein, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern, examines how the reductive Western view of landscapes reinforces colonization through exclusionary conservation practices, focusing on a case study of Tarangire National Park in Tanzania. Introducing the term “landscapism,” meaning the “double movement of colonizing landscapes/landscaping colonies,” Bluwstein offers a critical perspective, advocating for viewing landscapes through a lens of relationality.
Planet City is a worldbuilding project by Liam Young, envisioned as a multilayered city, occupying as little as 0,02 percent of Earth’s surface yet hosting all of the human population. Planet City is testing the Half-Earth idea by Edward O. Wilson, where we put aside half of the planet, to keep biodiversity. We spoke with Liam Young about the idea and the exhibition he curates, Visions of Planet City.
In this new series, we wish to highlight the value of models in the widest possible sense, from images to physical representations to diagrams … It’s about models, and modalities and modulations that formed them. It investigates the role of abstraction in representation, how all sorts of models serve as a communication device and also […]
As we confront the growing ecological crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that harmonious aesthetics, designed primarily for pleasure and ease, are always the most effective mode of expression. Perhaps there is space to question whether ecological efforts demand a different aesthetic attitude, one less fixated on traditional notions of balance and spatial conformity and more open to dissensus and confrontation.
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 […]
Gary Hilderbrand has been teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design since 1990 and is currently the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. He is also the founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, a leading landscape architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm was established in the […]
The book by the legendary Danish landscape architect, Carl Theodor Sørensen (1893-1979), originally published in 1966, is for the first time published in English, with a foreword by Joost Emmerik and an Introduction by Lodewijk Wiegersma. Published by Blawdruk Publishers and Sonja Poll, the 39 Unusual Gardens for an Ordinary House is a landmark book […]
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 […]
In the talk, Lydia Kallipoliti – #architect #educator #researcher #thinker – presents her newly published book Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia, followed by a Q&A where we talk about the intentions of writing the book, about how the “waste speaks of the incomplete perception of the World”, the psychological profile of ecological designers and […]
Sh*tscapes is a 160-page book by London-based landscape architects Vladimir Guculak and Paul Bourel. They are also founders of studio gb, landscape architecture and design studio focused on the integration of nature into the city.
A post-industrial park is typically a sexy landmark, easy to make a story of, photogenic, and a palimpsest in itself. It presents a victory of public use over the private and industrial by opening previously closed-off spaces. A post-industrial park offers some crucial topics of remediation, adaptive reuse, and social integration, among others. For a […]
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 […]
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]
We continue with French philosopher Michel Foucault. In his 1967 speech to an architecture audience, he introduced the concept of “heterotopia”. It was published in 1984 as an essay, Des Espaces Autres (Of Other Spaces), and it deals with the nature of space and its relation to society. Heterotopias are unique spatial entities that challenge conventional notions of space and compel reflection on the social, cultural, and ideological matters of our world.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The AI services embedded in tools for creative profiles are developing so rapidly that this article will definitely be outdated by 6 pm tomorrow. Last year we featured a piece on Midjourney and similar platforms, and it already reads like Grandpas discussing ‘the internets’ back in the 90s. I suppose enchantment by civilisation’s technological advances […]
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.
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