Abra Lee

Public horticulturalist, historian, and writer whose work centers on Black garden history. Lee has held roles as municipal arborist and airport landscape manager, and lectures widely for cultural and academic institutions. She founded Conquer the Soil, a platform dedicated to horticultural awareness through Black history, and was a 2019–20 Longwood Gardens Fellow. Her first book, Conquer the Soil, documents the overlooked contributions of Black gardeners, farmers, and growers in American history.

Adolphe Alphand

Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand (1817–1891, France) – French engineer of the Corps of Bridges and Roads, Alphand was central to Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris under Napoleon III. As director of the Service des Promenades et Plantations, he oversaw the creation of the Bois de Boulogne and a network of parks, promenades, and infrastructural works that redefined the modern city. Collaborating with Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, Eugène Belgrand, and Gabriel Davioud, Alphand fused engineering, landscape, and architecture into a coordinated urban vision.

Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou (born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and co-founder of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Université de Paris VIII alongside Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. His work is strongly informed by mathematics, particularly set theory and category theory, and he is best known for the project Being and Event. Badiou’s philosophy emphasizes the concepts of being, truth, the event, and the subject, rejecting linguistic relativism in favor of universalism. He has also been an active political commentator and advocate for the idea of communism as a continuing political force.

Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold, (1887–1948, United States), was an American ecologist, forester, and environmental philosopher, widely regarded as a founding figure of wildlife management and ecological ethics. His most influential work, A Sand County Almanac (1949), articulated the land ethic, reorienting conservation toward an ecological and moral framework. Rooted in both fieldwork and philosophical reflection, Leopold’s writings combine empirical attentiveness with ethical urgency. His thought continues to shape environmental ethics, sustainability discourse, and the practice of ecological stewardship.

Alenka Zupančič

Alenka Zupančič (born 1 April 1966 in Ljubljana) is a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist associated with the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. She studied philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and earned a second doctorate at Université Paris VIII under Alain Badiou. Her work focuses on Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and their intersections with politics and culture. Zupančič is a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a visiting professor at the European Graduate School. Along with Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, she has played a central role in bringing Lacanian theory into broader philosophical and cultural debates in Europe and North America.

Alexander Joseph Scholtes

Alexander Joseph Scholtes was born in South Boston to German immigrant parents. He became a designer with the Olmsted firm, contributing to its extensive portfolio with both designs and highly detailed drawings. Scholtes is remembered for his craftsmanship and for helping shape the representational legacy of the Olmsted practice.

Alexandra Tisma

Alexandra Tišma is a Landscape and Spatial Planning Expert, Educator, and Researcher. Tišma has been a tutor in academic writing at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture since 2009. She combines this role with over 20 years of experience as a senior researcher at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in The Hague. Alexandra’s career spans various academic and research positions, including roles as a researcher and lecturer in the Urban Planning department at the Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, and as an Associate Professor in Landscape Planning at the Faculty of Agriculture, Novi Sad, Serbia. She has widely published research and other publications.

Alexandre Champagne

Alexandre Champagne holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MLA from Cornell University. Before pursuing his education in the United States, he was a financial analyst at the Banque de France in Paris. He interned at Peter Walker and Partners (Berkeley, CA) and worked briefly at Michel Desvigne Paysagiste (Paris, France) before co-founding the firm Aire d’essai (Los Angeles, CA) in 2004. Based on choreographies of tailored individual and collective practices, his projects have been mini laboratories in which to experiment with ideas of communality, wellbeing, and education. His research addresses urban challenges and how professional involvement could have broader impacts on social well-being by relying on an applied-philosophy approach guided by interdisciplinary perspectives.

Alexis Şanal

MIT, MCP 2002, SCI-Arc, BArch, 1995. AIA
Alexıs’ vision of a streamlined relationship between people and the design of their environment reflected in her academic and professional pursuits. She has received awards for her architectural/urban design contributions to the community which reflect her passion is learning, cultural and civic environments that serve living culture embracing technologies and ecologies intelligently with the physical and natural environment. She currently leading research in Istanbul street market structure, the Pazar, launching the Wedgetopia initiative for transforming residual land into vibrant urban places, co-founder of Open Urban Practice and author of City Making 101.

Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) was a Finnish architect and designer whose work spanned buildings, interiors, furniture, glassware, and textiles, embodying the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Beginning with Nordic Classicism and moving through International Style modernism, he developed an organic modernism that emphasized human scale, material tactility, and a balance of rational and intuitive form. With his wife Aino Aalto, he designed complete environments where architecture and objects were inseparable. His bent plywood furniture and innovations in wood manufacturing shaped Scandinavian Modern design and influenced figures like Charles and Ray Eames. Aalto’s work, rooted in both romantic and pragmatic ideas, remains a cornerstone of modernism that sought to humanize the machine age.

Amy Strecker

Associate Professor at UCD Sutherland School of Law, Strecker is a leading expert on international cultural heritage law, environmental law, and the legal dimensions of landscape governance. With over two decades of research, she has shaped debates on land, property, and spatial justice, and in 2019 was awarded a major ERC grant on these themes.

Ana Kučan

Ana Kučan (Slovenia), landscape architect and professor at the University of Ljubljana, is co-founder of Studio AKKA. Her work has been widely exhibited and awarded, including the Plečnik Award, the Piranesi Award, and recognition at the European Rosa Barba Prize. Author of Landscape as a National Symbol, she has contributed to the Journal of Landscape Architecture, curated exhibitions such as All Shades of Green at the Venice Biennale, and lectures internationally.

André Corboz

André Corboz (5 June 1928, Geneva – 4 June 2012, Collonge-Bellerive) was a Swiss historian of art, architecture, and urban planning. He studied law at the University of Geneva before earning a doctorate in letters at Grenoble in 1981. Corboz taught architectural history at the University of Montreal (1967–1980) and later urban planning history at ETH Zurich (1980–1993), and was also a researcher at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He published widely on painting, architecture, and urbanism, and initiated the Historical Atlas of Swiss Cities (1997). His influential works include Invention of Carouge, 1772–1792, a study of city-making at the gates of Geneva in the late 18th century.

Andre Dekker

Andre Dekker (Del1, 1956) is a Dutch visual ar<st, working as a designer, draughtsman, scenograp-
her and author in the field of public art in the context of urban and landscape transi<ons. He lives
and works in RoHerdam, the Netherlands. He is co-founder and partner of Observatorium, a glo-
bally opera<ng ar<st group known for its large-scale works of art combining sculpture and place-
making.

André le Notre

André Le Nôtre (1613–1700) was the principal gardener of Louis XIV and the landscape architect of Versailles, the apex of the French formal garden. His designs extended geometric control into vast topographies, making landscape a projection of royal power. Collaborating with Le Vau and Le Brun, he produced enduring works at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Chantilly, and Fontainebleau. He also reshaped Parisian planning with the Tuileries axis, precursor of the Champs-Élysées. Le Nôtre’s jardin à la française remains the emblem of classical formality and orderly frames in landscape design.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (4 April 1932 – 29 December 1986) was a Soviet film director and screenwriter, widely regarded as one of the greatest figures in cinema history. Born in Russia, he studied under Mikhail Romm at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography. Tarkovsky’s films—such as Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), and Stalker (1979)—are known for their meditative pacing, long takes, and exploration of memory, nature, and spirituality. After conflicts with Soviet authorities, he worked abroad, creating Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986). He also authored Sculpting in Time (1986), a seminal reflection on cinema and art, before dying the same year from cancer.

Andrew Madl

Andrew Madl is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Architecture + Design. His teaching and research investigate digital media to speculate landscape consequences in response to technological explorations and advancements. 

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (1928–1987, USA) was an American artist, filmmaker, and cultural provocateur. He was the central figure of Pop Art and one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His work dismantled the boundaries between high art and mass culture, appropriating images of soup cans, celebrities, and advertisements into silkscreens, films, and multimedia events. Warhol’s New York studio, The Factory, became a crucible for avant-garde experimentation, celebrity culture, and queer expression in an era of repression. His practice exposed the mechanics of fame, desire, and commodification, leaving behind not only iconic works but also the enduring provocation of art as spectacle and surface.

Anette Freytag

Dr. Anette Freytag (born in Switzerland) is Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University. She previously taught at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, and the Technical University of Innsbruck. Freytag is the author of award-winning books, including The Landscapes of Dieter Kienast (J.B. Jackson Prize, 2022) and The Gardens of La Gara (European Garden Book Award, 2019). Her research spans designed landscapes from the 19th century to the present, with interests in phenomenology, topology, and walking. She is also co-founder of the Arts Integration Research Collaborative (AIR), advancing spatial justice and equitable access to nature.

Anita Bakshi

Anita Bakshi is an architect, historian, and educator at Rutgers University specializing in contested landscapes and memory in divided cities. Trained at UC Berkeley and Cambridge, she has worked in both practice and academia. Her research explores mapping, representation, and the role of design in conflict and reconciliation. She has exhibited ethnographic maps and drawings in collaboration with the United Nations Development Program. Her recent work addresses landscape, mourning, and commemoration in the Anthropocene.

Anita Berrizbeitia

Anita Berrizbeitia (b. 1957) is a Venezuelan-born landscape theorist, educator, and author, currently professor of landscape architecture at Harvard GSD, where she also served as department chair. She is recognized for advancing design theory through concepts of hybridity, operations, and cultural context. Her publications include Inside/Outside (1999, with Linda Pollak) and Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas (2004), both widely influential in design studies. A Rome Prize winner, she has linked Latin American modernism with contemporary theory and pedagogy.

Anna Halprin

Anna Halprin (1920–2021) was an American dancer and choreographer who helped pioneer postmodern dance and participatory performance. Based in San Francisco, she developed experimental movement scores and, with her husband Lawrence Halprin, the RSVP Cycles methodology. Her Planetary Dance (1987) invited collective participation across communities, linking movement, ritual, and healing. Influenced by her own cancer experience, Halprin integrated dance with therapy, ecology, and spiritual practice. Her legacy reshaped dance as both experimental art and embodied social practice.

Anna Thurmayr

Anna is a licensed landscape architect with over 30 years of experience as lead designer and project manager on high-profile projects in Germany, China, and Canada. She is a co-founder of the landscape design practice ‘Straub Thurmayr Landscape Architects and Urban Designers’ and holds full membership in both the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA/MALA) and the Bavarian Chamber of Architects in Germany. Throughout her career, Anna has gained essential knowledge and technical expertise in landscape design, project organization, project implementation, and visual communication.

Anna Tsing

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (b. 1952) is a Chinese-American anthropologist whose work bridges ecology, capitalism, and multispecies ethnography. Professor at UC Santa Cruz, she is best known for Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection and The Mushroom at the End of the World, a study of matsutake economies and survival in the Anthropocene. Her writing emphasizes precarity, entanglement, and unexpected collaborations across species and cultures. Tsing has advanced transdisciplinary approaches through the AURA research program in Denmark. She remains a key figure in rethinking human–nonhuman relations in anthropology.

Anne Whiston Spirn

Anne Whiston Spirn (born in Waterbury, Connecticut, 1947) is an American landscape architect, photographer, and author. She studied art history at Radcliffe College and earned a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. Spirn worked with Ian McHarg’s office before moving into academia, teaching at Harvard, then the University of Pennsylvania, and later joining MIT, where she is Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor. Her scholarship and practice emphasize ecological design, community empowerment, and the cultural dimensions of landscape. She received the International Cosmos Prize in 2001 for her contributions to sustainability and human–environment relations.

Antje Stokman

Antje Stokman is a landscape architect and professor at HafenCity University Hamburg, where she researches and teaches climate-adapted transformations of buildings, waterways, and infrastructure into livable spaces. Her interdisciplinary work integrates ecological, infrastructural, social, and aesthetic dimensions. Previously, she led the Institute for Landscape Planning and Ecology at the University of Stuttgart (2010–2017) and was a junior professor at Leibniz University, receiving the Lower Saxony Science Prize (2009) and the Topos Landscape Award (2010). Her projects have been shown internationally, including at the São Paulo and Rotterdam Architecture Biennales. She also heads the LILAS research network on blue-green infrastructures and is active in Studio Urbane Landschaften and the Association of German Landscape Architects.

Aristotle

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath whose writings shaped science, philosophy, and art for centuries. A student of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great, he founded the Lyceum in Athens and the Aristotelian tradition of systematic inquiry. His works in logic, ethics, politics, biology, and aesthetics became cornerstones of Western thought. Medieval scholars revered him as “The Philosopher,” and his influence persisted until modern science displaced parts of his natural philosophy. Today, Aristotle’s ideas on virtue, form, and causality still resonate in contemporary philosophy and theory.

Beatrice Palmquist

Beatrice Palmquist is a landscape architect based in Stockholm, Sweden. She graduated in 2023 with the thesis The Realistic Idea to be a Dreamer from the Swedish University of Agriculture, Alnarp. Since then she’s gained professional experience from landscape offices in Paris and Stockholm. This article is based on her thesis which can be found in full-length here: https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/18814/

Beatrix Gardner

Beatrix Tugendhut Gardner (1933–1995) was an Austrian-American zoologist best known for teaching American Sign Language to Washoe the chimpanzee, the first ape to acquire human language in this way. Educated at Radcliffe, Brown, and Oxford under Niko Tinbergen, she combined zoology with pioneering studies of animal communication. Her work with primates expanded debates on language, cognition, and the human–animal boundary. By showing that apes could learn signs, Gardner unsettled the assumption of human exclusivity in language. Her research remains central to discussions of animal agency and interspecies relations.

Berta Flaquer

Berta Flaquer is an architect and ecofeminist researcher with a PhD in Architecture (LTU, Luleå University of Technology). Her 2023 doctoral thesis, ‘Urbanization as Socionatures’ Reproduction: From Territories of Extraction,’ applies an ecofeminist lens to urbanization and examines the historical intersections of capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal extraction processes from Swedish-Sápmi. In 2019, she was a visiting researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Currently, she leads Oikos Arkitekter, a practice based in Sweden dedicated to co-designing regenerative and feminist habitats and ecosystems that cultivate ecodependent and interdependent relations between people, animals, and nature, while engaging with grassroots ecological movements in Sweden.

Bridget Snaith

Dr Bridget Snaith CMLI is a UK Landscape Architect with thirty years of experience in community-centred landscape design and co-design, living and practising in London between 2001 and 2021. She is a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Design Practice at the University of Sheffield and was part of the team at Sheffield who co-authored Natural England’s “Included Outside” publication series, published in 2022.

Bruno De Meulder

Bruno De Meulder is Professor of Urban Design, Urbanism, Landscape, and Planning at the University of Leuven. His work operates at the crossroads of spatial analysis and design experimentation, as well as between the history of urbanism and its contemporary postindustrial and postcolonial challenges. Over the past 25 years, he has developed concepts and strategies for a wide range of sites in Belgium and, more recently, in Vietnam in collaboration with RUA.

Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour (1947–2022) was a French philosopher and anthropologist, central to science and technology studies and co-developer of Actor–Network Theory. His works, including We Have Never Been Modern and Science in Action, unsettled the divides between nature and culture, subject and object. Latour emphasized practice over abstraction, showing how facts are constructed through networks of people, tools, and institutions. In later years, he became a leading thinker on ecology and the Anthropocene, urging a rethinking of politics in the face of climate crisis. He remains one of the most influential theorists for reimagining relations between humans, nonhumans, and environments.

C. Th. Sørensen

Søren Carl Theodor Marius Sørensen (1893–1979) was a Danish landscape architect and one of the leading modernists of the 20th century, alongside Thomas Church, Geoffrey Jellicoe, and Luis Barragán. Best known for co-creating the first adventure playground in Copenhagen in 1940 with Hans Dragehjelm, he championed open, sunlit play spaces over cramped courtyards. His work combined geometric clarity with sculptural landforms, and he authored eight influential books on garden design, urban open space, and education. Sørensen taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, serving as professor from 1954 to 1963, and received the Eckersberg (1945) and Prince Eugen (1972) Medals for his contributions.

Caio Reisewitz

Caio Reisewitz is one of Brazil’s leading photographers, known for monumental color prints that interrogate the relationship between humans, architecture, and environment. His recent works explore the exploitation of land and resources, while his collages create landscapes both otherworldly and familiar.

Carl Gustav Jung

Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Jung was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Breaking from Freud, he developed a comprehensive vision of the psyche centered on individuation—the lifelong process of integrating the conscious and unconscious. His concepts of archetypes, the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and psychological types (introversion and extraversion) shaped not only psychology but also philosophy, literature, religious studies, and the arts. Jung saw religion and myth as profound expressions of the psyche’s search for meaning, situating the symbolic at the heart of human experience. His thought continues to inform clinical practice and cultural theory alike.

Carmen Perrin

Carmen Perrin (b. 1953) is a Bolivian-born Swiss artist and educator known for sculptural and site-specific works. Trained in Geneva, she began with material-focused sculptures using industrial objects, later expanding into public art and collaborations with architects. Perrin chaired the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva (1989–2004), shaping a generation of artists. Her installations often explore the relation of body, material, and site, spanning museums and outdoor contexts. Her work is held in major collections, including MoMA in New York and MACBA in Barcelona.

Charles Birnbaum

Charles Birnbaum (b. 1961) is an American landscape architect and advocate, best known as founder and president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Before TCLF, he coordinated the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative, developing national standards for cultural landscape preservation. He has dedicated his career to identifying, documenting, and saving threatened landscapes across the U.S. Through TCLF’s Landslide program and public forums, Birnbaum has built broad awareness of designed landscapes as part of cultural heritage. His work continues to bridge preservation, advocacy, and education.

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was an English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection transformed science and human self-understanding. His voyage on HMS Beagle provided the observations that grounded his ideas on species variation and adaptation. In 1859 he published On the Origin of Species, establishing descent with modification as the dominant explanation of life’s diversity. His later works expanded evolutionary theory to human beings, sexuality, and even earthworms. Darwin’s legacy is among the most influential in modern history, reshaping biology, philosophy, and culture.

Christian Norberg-Schulz

Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000) was a Norwegian architect, historian, and theorist, born in Oslo. He studied at ETH Zurich, Rome, and Harvard, and later taught at Yale University, MIT, and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, where he served as professor and dean. Norberg-Schulz practiced architecture with Arne Korsmo before turning to theory, producing influential works such as Intentions in Architecture (1963) and Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1979). His writings introduced Heidegger’s phenomenology to architecture, shaping the field of architectural phenomenology despite critical debates about his interpretations. He is also known for contributions to the history of Italian baroque and classical architecture.

Christine Noe

Christine Noe is Associate Professor of Human Geography and Principal of the College of Social Sciences at the University of Dar es Salaam. Her research examines conservation, development politics, and rural livelihoods in Tanzania. She co-edited Prosperity in Rural Africa (2021) and Contested Sustainability (2022), and is active in mentoring emerging African scholars.

Christophe Girot

Christophe Girot (born in France, based in Switzerland) is a landscape architect, professor, and director of Atelier Girot. He taught at ETH Zurich from 2001 until becoming professor emeritus in 2023. Girot is recognized for pioneering digital and topographic methods in landscape architecture, particularly through his “Four Trace Concepts” of landing, grounding, finding, and founding, which frame design as both spatial and temporal inscription. His built works include the ETH Zurich Central Campus master plan and topographic interventions for AlpTransit in Ticino. Widely exhibited, including at MoMA’s Groundswell, Girot is noted for bridging technological innovation with cultural acceptance, positioning landscape architecture as both visionary and politically grounded.

Claude Cormier

Claude Cormier (1960–2023) was a Canadian landscape architect whose playful, often exuberant designs reshaped public spaces in Montreal, Toronto, and beyond. Trained in agronomy, landscape architecture, and design theory, he founded CCxA, a firm recognized internationally for its bold and colorful projects. His practice earned over 100 awards, including recognition from the Architectural League of New York and Harvard GSD. Cormier described his work as “serious fun,” creating landscapes that balance wit with civic engagement. Posthumously, he was honored with the Governor General’s Medal in Landscape Architecture in 2024.

Colin Rowe

Colin Rowe (1920–1999) was a British-born critic and historian whose teachings at Cornell profoundly shaped late twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. Through works like Collage City, he unsettled the dogmas of modernism, proposing hybridity and layered readings over totalizing visions. A magnetic and polarizing teacher, his influence radiated through generations of architects who absorbed his incisive method of comparative analysis. Honored with the RIBA Gold Medal, Rowe remains a figure who taught architecture to think against itself, with elegance and irreverence in equal measure.

Corinne Vionnet

Corinne Vionnet (born c. 1969, France/Switzerland) – a Franco-Swiss artist based in Vevey, Vionnet is a pioneer in the re-purposing of web-sourced imagery. Since the early 2000s, her practice has traversed archival research, collage, and the appropriation of crowd-generated photographs, interrogating the mass image as cultural memory. Her works—held in major collections from SF MoMA to Photo Élysée—unsettle the singularity of vision, instead layering thousands of images into ghostly composites of collective seeing. Exhibited internationally from Bilbao to New York to Doha, her practice unfolds at the threshold of authorship, digital culture, and the shared imaginary.

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (1921–2021) was a German-born Canadian landscape architect, celebrated for her integration of ecology, modern architecture, and social use. After escaping Nazi Germany, she studied in the U.S. and later founded her practice in Vancouver in 1953. Her work shaped iconic projects such as Robson Square, the National Gallery of Canada, and the UBC Museum of Anthropology. Oberlander championed ecological design long before it was mainstream, blending horticultural knowledge with civic ambition. She remains a pioneering figure in North American landscape architecture.

Dale Peterson

Dale Peterson (b. 1944) is an American writer of natural history and science, with a background in English literature. After earning a PhD at Stanford, he shifted from fiction to nonfiction, often weaving science with personal narrative. His work has examined mental illness, animal cognition, and conservation, written in accessible but deeply researched prose. Peterson became known for collaborations with primatologist Jane Goodall and for contributions to the ethics of human–animal relations. His writing brings ecological and psychological complexity into broader cultural view.

Dan Graham

Dan Graham (1942–2022) was an American artist, writer, and curator whose practice spanned conceptual art, video, performance, and architectural installations. Emerging in the 1960s, he connected minimalism, pop culture, and critical writing into hybrid works. His glass and mirror pavilions explored perception, public space, and the social construction of architecture. Graham’s writing was as influential as his installations, mixing rock music, television, and theory into cultural critique. His work blurred boundaries between art, architecture, and everyday life, making him a singular figure in postwar art.

Dan Handel

Dan Handel is an architect and curator whose work focuses on under-explored ideas, figures, and practices that shape contemporary built environments. Over the past fifteen years, he has been studying the links between scientists, forest managers and spatial designers, resulting in various exhibitions and publications on the subject.

Dan Kiley

Daniel Urban Kiley (1912–2004) was an American landscape architect, regarded as one of the leading modernists in the field. Trained under Warren H. Manning and at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he collaborated with figures like Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen. Kiley designed over a thousand landscapes, including the Gateway Arch grounds in St. Louis and works that married geometry with modern architecture. His practice combined formal order with subtle attention to planting and experience. Kiley remains a central figure in defining modern landscape architecture in the United States.

Daniel Dennett

Daniel C. Dennett (1942–2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, widely known for work on consciousness, evolution, and the philosophy of mind. He taught for decades at Tufts University, co-directing the Center for Cognitive Studies. A secularist and one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism, he wrote books that reached broad audiences while stirring intense debate. Dennett’s thinking on evolution and cognition challenged traditional views of free will, intentionality, and the mind-body problem. His clarity and provocation made him one of the most read philosophers of his era.

Daniel Ganz

Daniel Ganz is a landscape architect and founding director of Ganz Landschaftsarchitekten which opened in 1995. He studied landscape architecture at Interkantonales Technikum Rapperswil, Switzerland, he was a lecturer at HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil on the use of plant materials, a guest Professor at the Department for Architektur at EPFL and a guest lecturer at the chair of Prof. Christian Inderbitzin at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Since 2015 Ganz has been a lecturer at Studio Tom Emerson at ETH in Zurich.

Danilo Milovanović

David A. Wallace

David A. Wallace (1917–2004) was an American architect and planner who co-founded Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT) with Ian McHarg. Beginning in Philadelphia in the 1950s, he led major urban renewal strategies that shaped redevelopment models nationwide. His plan for Baltimore’s Charles Center and subsequent Inner Harbor became influential precedents in reimagining post-industrial downtowns. Wallace balanced large-scale planning with catalytic, site-specific interventions that sought to spark wider change. His legacy lies in bridging urban design, planning, and architecture through pragmatic yet ambitious projects.

Debra Solomon

Debra Solomon is a Dutch artist and infrastructure activist with over 25 years of experience in public space. Her work merges art, infrastructure activism, and social sciences, focusing on biodiversity, climate crisis, and the multispecies right to the city and subsequent right to the urban metabolism.

She coined the term Multispecies Urbanism (MU) and showcased the concept in the Dutch Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennial, titled “Who is We?”. Currently pursuing a PhD in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam, Solomon is also the founder of Urbaniahoeve – Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture. Its current (long-term) project is the 56-hectare Amsterdam Zuidoost Urban Food Forest (VBAZO), produced together with Renate Nollen and local human and more-than-human communities. She is experimenting with soil chromatography, which she develops in collaboration with mentor Ruben Borges.

Photo by Jeanette Groenendaal.

Del Tredici

Peter Del Tredici is an American botanist and author, best known for his decades of research on urban ecology and the ginkgo tree. He spent 35 years as a senior research scientist at the Arnold Arboretum and lectured at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, while also curating the Larz Anderson Bonsai Collection. A leading advocate for valuing “spontaneous” urban plants, he authored Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide (2010). His long-term studies of ginkgo contributed to rediscovering wild populations in China and to understanding the species’ resilience and reproduction. In 2013, he received the Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society for his contributions to horticultural science.

Denis Delbaere

Denis Delbaere is a French landscape architect and professor at ENSAPL in Lille, where he directs the Ville et Territoire Department of LaCTH. His research explores “infrascapes” and the spontaneous green networks that emerge along infrastructures, linking theory with management practices. An active member of Collectif LIKOTO and contributor to the national ITTECOP program, he has published widely, including Table rase et paysage (2016) and Altérations paysagères (2021).

Denise Hoffman Brandt

Denise Hoffman Brandt earned her educational credentials at the University of Pennsylvania in art history, continuing painting at Pratt Institute and concluding with studying landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to holding a professorship at the City College of New York, she was an adjunct and visiting professor at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. She was also a project manager at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and a senior landscape architect at Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, before establishing her own practice Hoffman Brandt Projects, where among other topics, she engages in activist design for crisis situations and critical mapping, say uranium activities across the US or gun cartridge distribution found after the 2015 Baltimore protests. 

Diana Balmori

Diana Balmori (1932–2016) was a Spanish-born landscape and urban designer, founder of Balmori Associates in New York. Trained in Argentina and the U.S., she combined design with scholarship, earning a PhD in urban history. Her work moved fluidly between large-scale urban projects and experimental approaches, always blending ecological insight with cultural narratives. Balmori became known for her ability to integrate living systems into urban fabrics, often with poetic attention to form and process. She remains a key voice for merging design with ecology in the contemporary city.

Dieter Kienast

Dieter Alfred Kienast (30 October 1945, Zollikon – 23 December 1998, Zurich) was a Swiss landscape architect and professor who became a defining figure in European landscape architecture. Trained in gardening and later at Kassel under Günther Grzimek, Peter Latz, and Lucius Burckhardt, he integrated ecological knowledge with artistic and urban sensibilities. Kienast’s practice, including Kienast Vogt Partner in Zurich, explored how rigorous plant sociology could be reconciled with questions of form, atmosphere, and aesthetic intensity. He taught at Rapperswil, Karlsruhe, and ETH Zurich, mentoring a generation of influential designers. His legacy lies in treating landscape as simultaneously ecological system and cultural construction, refusing to reduce it to either pure function or pure art.

Dietmar Straub

Dietmar has had the opportunity of dealing with a diverse range of assignments in his career, in very different places, cultures, sites and countries – both as a teacher and as a landscape architect and urban designer. He has been tackling gardens and landscapes, squares and cities for more than 30 years and have gained a fundamental understanding and knowledge of design, urban nature and ecology. He believes that an intelligent cross-linking of ecology, design, art and engineering will provide sustainable solutions for humankind and nature.

Dingeman Deijs

Dingeman Deijs studied at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam. After winning the Archiprix in 2009 he founded his office Dingeman Deijs Architects in Amsterdam. In 2011 he received a starting stipend from the BKVB fund and in 2014 he was selected for the Prix de Rome. Since 2009 he has been a guest lecturer at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, Arnhem, Tilburg and Groningen. He has given lectures in Amsterdam, Antwerp, New York, Seoul and Santos. With his office, he works at the interface between architecture and landscape on design research, buildings, bridges, art objects and public spaces.

Donielle Kaufman

Donielle holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from Scripps College and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a master’s degree in landscape architecture and urban planning from USC. Her training includes the offices of Doug Aitken Workshop, MOCA, and Pamela Burton. Donielle is a licensed landscape architect in California.

Donna Haraway

Donna Jeanne Haraway (born 1944, United States) is an American scholar whose work has unsettled the boundaries between science, technology, feminism, and ecology. Professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was the first to hold tenure in feminist theory in the United States, shaping the field through her teaching and writing since the 1980s. Her texts, from Primate Visions to Modest_Witness and beyond, interrogate anthropocentrism, decenter the human, and foreground the generative agency of nonhuman processes—whether animals, machines, or ecologies. Haraway’s idiom is one of irony and world-making: cyborgs, companion species, and situated knowledges become figures through which new ethics of responsibility and kinship are imagined. Awarded numerous international prizes, she continues to stand as one of the most influential voices in ecofeminism and technoscience. Her thought insists that life on a damaged planet demands new stories, hybrid genealogies, and alliances across species and systems.

Dunne & Raby

Dunne & Raby is a design studio founded in London in 1994 by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Known for their development of Critical Design, they use speculative projects to probe the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies. Anthony Dunne trained in industrial design and completed a PhD in Computer Related Design at the RCA, while Fiona Raby studied architecture and completed an MPhil at the RCA. Both were Senior Research Fellows at the RCA before leading the Design Interactions department (2005–2015), which MoMA’s Paola Antonelli credited with “changing the course of design.” Since 2016, they have been based in New York, teaching at Parsons and directing the Designed Realities Studio.

Dušan Ogrin

Dušan Ogrin (Slovenia, 1929–2019) was a pioneering Slovenian landscape architect and professor at the University of Ljubljana. Founder of landscape architecture studies in Slovenia and Croatia, he transformed the Department of Horticulture into the Department of Landscape Architecture in 1972. His teaching and publications helped establish the field regionally, while his academic leadership shaped generations of practitioners from GSD to Cornell, to Ljubljana.

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl (8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician, founder of phenomenology. Educated in mathematics under Karl Weierstrass and philosophy under Franz Brentano, he sought to establish philosophy as a rigorous science through analyses of intentionality and the phenomenological reduction. He taught at Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg, influencing generations of thinkers. Husserl’s mature philosophy emphasized transcendental consciousness as the ground of knowledge, framing phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist project. His work profoundly shaped 20th-century thought, though he was marginalized late in life under Nazi racial laws.

Eduardo Souto De Moura

Eduardo Souto de Moura (b. 1952) is a Portuguese architect, Pritzker Prize laureate (2011) and Wolf Prize recipient (2013), whose work bridges modernist rigor with sensitivity to material and context. Trained at the Porto School of Architecture and an early collaborator of Álvaro Siza, he established his practice in 1980 with the Casa das Artes in Porto. His projects range from private houses to major civic works and restorations, most notably the transformation of the ruined 12th-century Santa Maria do Bouro monastery into a contemporary hotel. Known for precise geometries and restrained forms, his architecture often juxtaposes stone, concrete, and landscape in ways that feel at once austere and deeply rooted. Souto de Moura’s work is celebrated for its balance between permanence and adaptation, modernity and tradition.

Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson (1929–2021) was an American biologist, naturalist, and entomologist who pioneered sociobiology and co-developed the theory of island biogeography. A long-time Harvard professor, he authored influential works such as Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, On Human Nature (Pulitzer Prize, 1979), and The Ants (Pulitzer Prize, 1991). Wilson’s research on social insects and evolution reshaped ecology and sparked major debates across biology, anthropology, and ethics.

Edward Relph

Edward Relph (born in Wales, raised in the Wye Valley) is a Canadian geographer best known for his influential book Place and Placelessness (1976). He studied at the University of London and the University of Toronto, where he later became professor of geography and chaired the Division of Social Sciences at Scarborough campus. Relph’s work has been central to the phenomenological study of geography, especially the concepts of place, sense of place, and their transformation in modernity. He remains active as a scholar and lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Eleni Mente

Eleni Mente is a Chartered Landscape Architect (CMLI) with 20 years of experience in creating spaces for living creatures. She is the founder of Element landscape architecture studio. After finishing an MSc degree in Agriculture/Horticulture, she trained in Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield in the UK, with Nigel Dunnett as her supervising tutor. Her expertise includes public realm design and frameworks, housing regeneration schemes, education and hospitality projects. She contributes her knowledge as a member of design review panels and regularly authors articles for professional publications. She set up the Meta.Biosis Lab project and has been recognised for her ongoing research in Japan, receiving grants as an individual from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Her research focuses on Disaster-Preventive Parks as places of protection and places of memory.

Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012), political scientist and Nobel laureate, dismantled the inevitability of Hardin’s tragedy. Through decades of fieldwork, she demonstrated that communities can—and often do—govern shared resources sustainably without relying on markets or states. At her Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, she fostered a collective mode of inquiry, where governance was studied as practice, not abstraction. Her work remains a quiet yet radical counterpoint to technocratic and deterministic views of human ecology, grounding politics in the lived pragmatics of cooperation.

Elisabeth Sjödahl

Elisabeth Sjödahl is landscape architect, architect and urbanist. She holds a landscape degree from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) Barcelona and an architectural degree from the École d’architecture de la ville et des territoires Paris-Est. She is currently a Professor at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) and co-founder of a new landscape architecture program, a collaboration between AHO and UiT (winner of the international Ribas Piera School Prize, 2023). Past teaching at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) Stockholm and the Technical University of València (ETSA). She has experience from regional landscape planning, private practice and is a founding partner of the office Worksonland. She currently carries out multidisciplinary research that explores human cultural, water and ground relations across scales.

Élisée Reclus

Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) was a French geographer, anarchist, and prolific writer whose work connected geography with politics and ecology. A member of the First International and the Paris Commune, he combined activism with scholarship, producing monumental works like Universal Geography and Man and the Earth. He is considered a precursor of social geography and early ecological thinking, linking landscapes with justice, freedom, and collective life. Reclus also lived his ideals, advocating vegetarianism, naturism, and free union. His vision of geography as both science and social critique still resonates in political ecology.

Elliott Maltby

Elliott Maltby is an American landscape and urban designer whose work bridges art, ecology, and public engagement. She is a founding partner of thread collective, a multidisciplinary practice focused on environmental resilience, community participation, and spatial justice. Maltby’s teaching and research emphasize socio-ecological systems, nature-based solutions, and feminist and multispecies perspectives, notably through the Inclusive Ecologies initiative at Pratt Institute. She has collaborated with artists, scientists, and dancers to explore urban ecologies and is a long-time board member of the Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance. Her work highlights how hidden ecologies and cultural practices shape just and responsive public spaces.

Erik Dhont

Erik Dhont (1962 – ) is a Belgian landscape architect known for his free and sensitive reinterpretations of historical garden design, often shaped through abstract forms. He studied landscape architecture in Vilvoorde, graduating in 1986, and founded his practice in Brussels in 1989. His work spans private gardens, restorations, and public spaces across Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, California, and the Azores. Notable commissions include the gardens of Dries Van Noten, Baron and Baroness Guy Ullens de Schooten, and the Musée Picasso in Paris. Dhont has collaborated with architects and designers such as Philippe Samyn, Axel Vervoordt, and Gert Voorjans, and has exhibited internationally, representing Belgium at L’Art du Jardin in Paris (2013).

Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch (8 July 1885 – 4 August 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher, noted for his philosophy of hope and utopia. Influenced by Hegel, Marx, and mystical thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer and Jacob Böhme, Bloch combined Marxist materialism with eschatological and religious motifs. His friendships with Lukács, Brecht, Weill, Benjamin, and Adorno situate him at the heart of 20th-century critical thought. Bloch’s most important works, including The Principle of Hope, emphasize the unfinished nature of reality and the human drive toward emancipation.

Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was a German zoologist, naturalist, and artist, known for popularizing Darwin’s ideas in Germany and coining terms like “ecology,” “phylogeny,” and “Protista.” He described thousands of new species and created dazzling scientific illustrations, collected in Art Forms of Nature, which influenced Art Nouveau. Haeckel’s work blurred science and art, but also carried problematic legacies, including his promotion of scientific racism and Social Darwinism. His “recapitulation theory” is now discredited, but it shaped early biology and education. He remains both an innovator in natural science and a cautionary figure in its misuse.

Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion (XR, 2018) is a global activist movement founded in the UK, advocating nonviolent civil disobedience to demand urgent climate action. Its tactics include mass demonstrations, blockades, and occupations of public spaces, drawing inspiration from the civil rights movement and suffragettes. XR frames climate change and biodiversity loss as existential crises, symbolized by its circled hourglass logo. The movement has been praised for raising urgency but criticized for disruptive tactics and alienating potential supporters. XR remains one of the most visible grassroots movements confronting ecological collapse in the 21st century.

Fabian Brunsing

Félix Guattari

Pierre-Félix Guattari (30 March 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and activist. He co-developed schizoanalysis and is best known for his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze on Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), collected as Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Guattari also formulated the concept of “ecosophy,” linking ecological, social, and mental dimensions in an expanded view of environmental politics. His work combined political militancy, psychoanalysis, and philosophical experimentation, leaving a lasting mark on critical theory.

Frank Gallagher

Frank Gallagher is an American ecologist and educator whose career bridges public land management, academic research, and teaching. He has served in leadership roles in New Jersey’s Division of Parks and Forestry and later became Director of the Environmental Planning and Design program at Rutgers University. His research focuses on urban ecological restoration, particularly the sublethal effects of soil contamination on plants and ecosystems. Gallagher has published widely on phytoremediation, ecosystem ethics, and brownfield redevelopment. He remains an influential advocate for linking science, policy, and ecological design.

Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted (26 April 1822 – 28 August 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, and social reformer, widely regarded as the father of landscape architecture in the United States. With his partner Calvert Vaux, he co-designed Central Park and Prospect Park in New York, launching a career that shaped public landscapes across North America. His work extended to park systems, institutional campuses, and planned communities, including the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Riverside, Illinois, and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Olmsted’s vision combined ecological sensitivity, democratic ideals, and large-scale planning, establishing parks as vital social and civic infrastructure.

Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) was a German playwright, poet, philosopher, and historian, and a central figure of Weimar Classicism alongside Goethe. His works, from The Robbers to Wallenstein, combined political passion with aesthetic theory. As professor in Jena, he wrote historical studies while developing ideas about freedom, beauty, and play. His Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man shaped modern aesthetics, famously elevating play as a reconciliatory force between reason and sense. Schiller’s legacy endures in literature, philosophy, and theories of art as emancipation.

Gabriella Hirst

Gabriella Hirst is an artist and writer from Sydney (Cammeraygal land), based in Berlin. She works primarily with moving image, sculpture, performance, and with the garden as a site of critique and care, exploring the politics of capture, the maintenance of illusions of stasis within archival systems, and the structural violence(s) embedded within decorative and ornamental forms.

Gaia Radić

Gaia Radić is a new media artist born in 2001. in Pula, Croatia. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sculpture from the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka, Croatia and is currently based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she is studying Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and Video, Animation & New media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design. In her projects, she explores the correlation between virtual, mental and physical space through the combined use of computer graphics and spatial installation.

Garrett Hardin

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003), ecologist and microbiologist, is most remembered for articulating the “tragedy of the commons,” a stark parable of collective ruin. His dictum, “We can never do merely one thing,” framed human interventions as entangled, unpredictable, and often destructive. Yet his environmental warnings were shadowed by exclusionary and racist ideologies, including eugenics and hardline anti-immigration stances. His work oscillates between prescient ecological caution and ethically compromised politics, making him one of the most contested figures in environmental thought.

Gary Hilderbrand

Gary Hilderbrand, landscape architect and educator, is Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice and Chair of Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD, and founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand. His practice negotiates the fragile balance of ecological systems, urban density, and cultural memory, producing landscapes both resilient and lyrical. His writings—Making a Landscape of Continuity, The Miller Garden, Visible | Invisible—probe continuity, form, and perception across scales. Recipient of the ASLA Design Medal and Rome Prize, Hilderbrand embodies a rare duality: systemic foresight paired with poetic sensitivity, each project an aperture into deeper terrains of thought.

George Van Dyne

George Van Dyne (1933–1981) was an American ecologist and pioneer of systems ecology. Trained in animal and range science, he developed mathematical models of rangeland ecosystems that influenced ecological theory worldwide. As the first director of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, he helped establish systems ecology as a major research field. His work was highly regarded in the Soviet Union, where his modeling approaches were considered groundbreaking. Though his career was cut short, Van Dyne remains a foundational figure in linking ecology, mathematics, and systems thinking.

Georges Descombes

Georges Descombes, Geneva-born (1939) “architect of landscape,” approaches sites as palimpsests layered with memory, absence, and possibility. His projects—from Parc de Lancy to the renaturing of the River Aire—refuse nostalgia, insisting instead on landscapes that reveal traces of the past while arousing the intensities of the present. Through teaching, experiments, and strong gestures in the public realm, Descombes pursues what he calls an “urbanism of revelation,” raising the temperature of the everyday. Descombes is a Swiss “architect of landscape,” whose work bridges architecture, pedagogy, and practice. After formative years with Pier Luigi Nervi and Marc-Joseph Saugey, and a period in London, he returned to Geneva in 1975 to teach and founded the Centre de Réalisation Expérimentale at the École d’Architecture de Genève, later holding visiting professorships at Harvard and the University of Virginia. His projects—such as Parc de Lancy, the Swiss Path at Lake Lucerne, and the Bijlmer Monument—treat landscapes as palimpsests, layering visible and invisible traces of history to shape present and future meanings. From urban interventions in Lyon, Antwerp, and Brussels to his use of participatory processes, Descombes emphasized strong gestures and architecture as an art of experience. His renaturation of the River Aire (2000–2015) stands as a manifesto project, confronting nature’s violence and artifice while reflecting on humanity’s role in the Anthropocene.

Georges Teyssot

Georges Teyssot is an architect, historian, and theorist of architecture and landscape. He has taught at IUAV Venice, Princeton, ETH Zurich, and since 2004 at Laval University in Quebec. His writing spans garden history, domesticity, Walter Benjamin, and everyday life, with key works like The Architecture of Western Gardens and A Topology of Everyday Constellations. Teyssot has also collaborated with Diller + Scofidio, notably curating The American Lawn exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His work blends historical scholarship with critical interventions in contemporary theory.

Gilles Clément

Gilles Clément (born 1943) is a French landscape architect (paysagiste), botanist, entomologist, and writer. Both in theory and practice, his work advocates for biodiversity, ecological processes, and working with rather than against natural forces. He is widely known for formulating influential concepts such as the Garden in Motion, the Planetary Garden, and the Third Landscape. Clément’s designs and writings emphasize effortlessness, diversity, and ecological coexistence, positioning him as a central figure for a more biodiverse and sustainable future. He is also the winner of the 2022 LILA Honour Award.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher whose work spanned philosophy, literature, art, and film. He is best known for his collaborations with Félix Guattari, including Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), collected as Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze’s major solo work, Difference and Repetition (1968), is considered a landmark in metaphysical thought. His philosophy reinterpreted figures such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and profoundly influenced post-structuralism, critical theory, and the arts.

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is an Italian philosopher whose work bridges political theory, philosophy, literature, and philology. He is best known for concepts such as homo sacer, the state of exception, and form-of-life, ideas that draw on and extend Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. Educated in Rome, he participated in Martin Heidegger’s Le Thor seminars in the 1960s and later worked at the Warburg Institute in London, where he wrote Stanzas (1977). Agamben has been strongly influenced by Walter Benjamin, whose lost manuscripts he helped recover and edit, and his thought has engaged with figures ranging from Carl Schmitt to Jean-Luc Nancy. His writings, including The Coming Community (1990) and State of Exception (2003), explore the intersections of law, politics, and life, often questioning the borders that define humanity, community, and power.

Giovanni Aloi

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 Visual Culture, Aloi seeks to create space for reflection on human-nature relationships.

Glenn Albrecht

Glenn Albrecht (b. 1953, Australia)

Environmental philosopher and former professor of sustainability, Albrecht coined the concepts of solastalgia (the distress caused by environmental loss) and the Symbiocene (a future era of symbiotic flourishing). His research explores “psychoterratic” conditions, where ecological transformation shapes human mental health. Author of Earth Emotions (2019), Albrecht reframes the affective bonds between people, ecosystems, and planetary change.

Gordon Geballe

Gordon Geballe is an American ecologist and educator, long associated with Yale University. He co-authored Redesigning the American Lawn (1993), a pivotal book connecting private lawn care to global ecological crises and urging sustainable practices. His teaching has extended internationally, including post-disaster development courses in Haiti. Geballe has served on numerous environmental boards and community organizations, linking research to activism. His career centers on reframing everyday landscapes as levers of ecological responsibility.

Graham Harman

Graham Harman (born 9 May 1968) is an American philosopher and one of the leading figures of speculative realism. He developed Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), a metaphysical framework emphasizing the autonomy and withdrawal of objects beyond human perception. Harman studied at St. John’s College and earned his PhD at DePaul University under Alphonso Lingis. He taught for 16 years at the American University in Cairo and is now Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. His work has influenced philosophy, art, and architecture, reframing debates about realism and materiality.

Günther Vogt

Günther Vogt (b. 1957) is a Swiss landscape architect and educator, founder of VOGT Landschaftsarchitekten, with offices in Zurich, Berlin, London, and Paris. Trained in horticulture and landscape architecture, he began his career with Dieter Kienast before establishing his own widely acclaimed practice. Vogt’s work is known for adventurous, non-linear design, weaving botany, materiality, and cultural narratives into contemporary landscapes. He taught for nearly two decades at ETH Zurich and has lectured widely around the world. His practice remains influential in pushing landscape architecture into new conceptual and ecological terrains.

Han Lörzing

Han Lörzing is trained as a landscape architect at Wageningen University. He began his career as a park designer. Later, he worked as a project manager for municipal and provincial planning agencies, taught landscape and park architecture at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and became a researcher in town and country planning. He was also the co-founder of a planning and design consultancy and an associate with an urban planning office in London. Lörzing wrote several books on landscape and environmental art as a freelance author for professional and general audiences.

Harriet Pattison

Harriet Pattison (1928–2023) was an American landscape architect who studied under Ian McHarg, Roberto Burle Marx, and M. Paul Friedberg at the University of Pennsylvania. She collaborated with Louis Kahn on major works, including the Kimbell Art Museum grounds and Four Freedoms Park in New York. Her career also included private practice and teaching, with projects that combined modernist architecture and landscape design. Pattison later published a memoir, Our Days Are Like Full Years (2020), documenting her professional and personal relationship with Kahn. Her work contributes to the legacy of women in modern landscape architecture.

Hartmut Rosa

Hartmut Rosa (b. 1965) is a German sociologist and political scientist best known for his theories of social acceleration and resonance. In his seminal work Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, he argued that technological progress, social change, and the pace of everyday life create a paradoxical shortage of time, generating alienation and disorientation. Rosa describes modernity as a history of ever-increasing temporal pressures in which individuals can no longer exhaust the possibilities available within a lifetime. As an alternative to alienation, he developed resonance theory, a “sociology of world relations” that emphasizes transformative encounters and reciprocal attunement between humans and their world. Rosa positions resonance not as a commodity or controllable state, but as a fragile condition that societies can nurture by creating spaces and rhythms that allow for openness and mutual transformation. His work extends the tradition of critical theory, drawing from Charles Taylor and Erich Fromm, while contributing to contemporary debates on democracy, education, ecology, and social justice.

Henri Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre (16 June 1901 – 29 June 1991) was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist. He is best known for his writings on the critique of everyday life, the right to the city, and the production of space, which became foundational concepts for urban theory. Lefebvre authored more than sixty books and three hundred articles, contributing to debates on dialectical materialism, alienation, and modernity. His work influenced urban studies, geography, and architecture, making him a key reference for critical understandings of space and society.

Henri Maldiney

Henri Maldiney (1912–2013, France) – French philosopher whose work bridged phenomenology, aesthetics, and psychology. After imprisonment during the Second World War, he taught at Ghent and later at the University of Lyon, developing influential ideas on perception, art, and existence. Maldiney’s philosophy is marked by an exploration of openness, event, and presence, which continue to resonate in contemporary aesthetic and existential thought.

Herbert Bormann

F. Herbert Bormann (1922–2012) was an American plant ecologist best known for co-discovering acid rain through research at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire in 1971. His findings helped reshape U.S. environmental policy and led to amendments of the Clean Air Act. A prolific scholar, he authored over 200 papers and eight books, often focusing on forests, soil, and ecosystem processes. He taught for decades at Dartmouth College and Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Bormann’s work exemplifies how ecological science can directly influence public awareness and legislation.

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was an English philosopher and polymath whose writings spanned sociology, biology, psychology, and ethics. He coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” extending evolutionary concepts into social and cultural domains. In the 19th century, he was one of the most widely read European intellectuals, shaping debates in science and society. Though influential in his time, his embrace of Social Darwinism and Lamarckism diminished his standing in the 20th century. Today, Spencer is studied both as a system-builder and as a figure exemplifying Victorian confidence in evolutionary progress.

Hermann Mattern

Hermann Mattern (27 November 1902 – 17 November 1971) was a German landscape architect and architect. Trained first as a gardener, he studied landscape and architecture in Berlin-Dahlem, attending lectures by Heinrich Tessenow and Walter Gropius. He worked with Karl Foerster and Herta Hammerbacher and collaborated with Leberecht Migge before establishing himself as a leading designer. Mattern created numerous gardens, urban development projects, and institutional landscapes, shaping German modernist landscape architecture in the mid-20th century.

Hortense Blanchard

Hortense Blanchard is a landscape architect with a degree from the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage in Versailles. She previously studied applied arts and spatial design at the École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Art Boulle in Paris. Hortense co-founded the collective Atelier Bivouac in France, and later worked in Mexico for Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura and in London with landscape architect Irène Djao Rakitine and garden designer Dan Pearson before starting her own practice.

Humphry Repton

Humphry Repton (1752–1818), last master of the English landscape garden, translated the pastoral tradition into the visual language of before-and-after views. His famous “Red Books,” with fold-out sketches, offered clients landscapes of transformation, at once pragmatic and theatrical. Repton’s style bridged the smooth naturalism of Capability Brown and the eclectic, picturesque gardens of the nineteenth century, earning him the title of the first to call himself a “landscape gardener.”

Ian McHarg

Ian McHarg (1920–2001) was a Scottish landscape architect, planner, and educator, best known for his landmark book Design With Nature (1969). He founded the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and popularized ecological planning as a method integrating natural systems into design. McHarg’s method prefigured GIS, mapping soil, hydrology, and vegetation to guide planning decisions. He was a charismatic teacher and public intellectual, linking environmentalism with design during the rise of the ecological movement. McHarg remains one of the most influential figures in modern landscape architecture and ecological planning.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher of the Enlightenment, spent his life in Königsberg, Prussia, where he taught logic and metaphysics. He is widely regarded as the central figure of modern philosophy. His three Critiques—Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790)—redefined philosophy’s scope across knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. Of particular relevance to art and landscape discourse, the Critique of Judgment provided a systematic account of aesthetic judgment, beauty, and the sublime, establishing categories still fundamental in design and landscape theory. Kant’s work remains foundational for epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, law, and the philosophy of history.

Ingo Kowarik

Ingo Kowarik is a German ecologist and professor of ecosystem science and plant ecology at the Technical University of Berlin. His research focuses on biodiversity, invasive species, and urban ecology, with particular attention to novel habitats in cities. He introduced the concept of “fourth nature,” describing spontaneous ecosystems in post-industrial and disturbed sites. Kowarik advises governmental and scientific bodies on conservation and landscape planning, and coordinates research networks on biological invasions. His work emphasizes the intersection of people, cities, and ecological processes in shaping urban nature.

Iris Lauterbach

Iris Lauterbach (born 1959) is a German art historian and professor, based at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. She studied art history and Romance philology in Mainz, Pavia, and Paris, earning her doctorate in 1985, followed by research fellowships in Berlin, Rome, and Los Angeles. Since 1991, she has worked as a researcher in Munich, focusing on the history of garden art. Lauterbach also teaches at the Technical University of Munich, where she has been honorary professor since 2012. Her scholarship bridges art history, garden history, and cultural studies.

Ivan Illich

Ivan Dominic Illich (1926–2002) was an Austrian-born Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic best known for his radical critiques of modern institutions. In Deschooling Society (1971) he argued that institutionalized education alienates learners and suppresses self-directed knowledge, while Medical Nemesis (1975) revealed how industrialized medicine often generates harm, dependency, and overreach. Through the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Illich challenged the cultural imperialism of development and missionary programs, exposing how “aid” could reproduce domination. His thought was marked by a search for forms of autonomy and subsistence beyond the reach of industrial systems. A polyglot and self-described “errant pilgrim,” Illich offered a vision of social life grounded in limits, freedom, and mutual responsibility. One of his enduring contributions is the notion of conviviality, a guiding thread throughout his critique of modern society.

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004, France/Algeria)

Philosopher and founder of deconstruction, Derrida reshaped the humanities through rigorous readings of language, philosophy, and literature. Rejecting fixed meanings, his work exposed instability at the core of texts, concepts, and institutions. Author of Of Grammatology (1967) and over forty books, he influenced fields from literary theory and law to architecture and political thought. Often controversial for his dense style, Derrida nevertheless became one of the most influential voices of late 20th-century philosophy.

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan (13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who profoundly reshaped psychoanalysis through a structuralist and linguistic rereading of Freud. Trained in psychiatry in Paris, he became a member of the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris in 1938, later conducting his influential seminars at the École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne. His work emphasized the primacy of language in the unconscious, drawing on linguistics, topology, and structuralism. Lacan’s return to Freud critiqued dominant schools such as ego psychology and provoked institutional controversies, leading to his break with the International Psychoanalytic Association. His teaching remains central to psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and cultural critique.

Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière (born 1940, Algiers) is a French philosopher known for his work on politics and aesthetics. After studying at the École normale supérieure under Louis Althusser, he broke with his teacher following 1968, turning toward a philosophy of emancipation. He taught at the University of Paris VIII from 1969 until his retirement in 2000. Rancière’s major contributions concern the “distribution of the sensible,” the idea that politics and aesthetics both shape the conditions of perception, visibility, and participation. His writings on literature, film, and art critique hierarchies of representation and argue for the emancipated spectator—one who interprets freely rather than passively receiving meaning. Rancière remains highly influential in political theory, art criticism, and media studies.

James A. Lord

James A Lord, FASLA, is a founding partner of Surfacedesign, Inc. James’ innovative design approach and stewardship of the firm’s design practice has established Surfacedesign as an international leader in urban design and sustainability. He leads projects in New Zealand, Hawaii, Mexico, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. James received his MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and his BARCH from the University of Southern California.

James Balog

James Balog (born 1952, USA), is an American photographer, known for his searing visual investigations of environmental change. Founder of the Earth Vision Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and the Extreme Ice Survey (2007), he has documented the fragility of glaciers and the accelerating violence of climate collapse. His lens has also turned to endangered species and North America’s ancient forests, seeking to reveal ecological precarity through aesthetic testimony. Recognized by institutions from the U.S. Postal Service to the Royal Photographic Society, Balog situates photography as both witness and warning.

James Hutton

James Hutton (1726–1797, Scotland), known as the founder of modern geology, Hutton revealed the abyss of deep time through field observations like Siccar Point’s unconformity, showing that Earth is shaped by slow, enduring processes. He pioneered uniformitarianism—recognizing that the present landscape is the sedimented past made visible—and thus shattered mythic conceptions of Earth’s age. Hutton’s vision laid the temporal ground for evolutionary theory and transformed how humans inhabit geological presence.

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall (b. 1934) is an English primatologist, anthropologist, and conservationist, widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees. Beginning her research in Gombe Stream National Park in 1960, she transformed scientific understanding of animal behavior and social life. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots program, linking primate research to global conservation and youth activism. Goodall has consistently advocated for biodiversity, animal welfare, and planetary stewardship, serving also as a UN Messenger of Peace. Her work bridges rigorous observation, ecological ethics, and public advocacy.

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) was an American-Canadian writer, theorist, and activist who transformed urban studies. Her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) critiqued top-down urban renewal and defended the complexity of lived neighborhoods. Through grassroots activism she helped block projects such as Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway and later Toronto’s Spadina Expressway. Often dismissed for her lack of formal planning credentials, Jacobs became one of the most influential critics of modernist planning, shaping debates in urbanism, sociology, and economics.

Jason Moore

Jason W. Moore is an American environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he coordinates the World-Ecology Research Collective. His scholarship develops the world-ecology framework, situating capitalism as a system that organizes not only labor and capital but also nature. In Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) and Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (2016), Moore challenges dominant narratives of the Anthropocene, arguing instead for the Capitalocene to highlight capitalism’s role in ecological crisis. His work bridges environmental history, political economy, and social theory, and has been recognized with multiple international awards.

Jean-François Lyotard

Philosopher, sociologist, and theorist of art and culture, Lyotard is best known for defining postmodernism as the collapse of grand narratives and the rise of fragmented, plural knowledges. His wide-ranging work engaged with aesthetics, politics, memory, and the sublime, addressing how modernity and its aftermath shape human experience. Author of The Postmodern Condition (1979) and 25 other books, he remains central to debates on knowledge, art, and the shifting terrain of contemporary thought.

Jenny B. Osuldsen

Jenny B. Osuldsen, graduated with a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in 1991 and has also studied landscape architecture and art at Cal Poly University Pomona, Los Angeles, USA. She has been working in Snøhetta since 1995 and is one of six partners in Snøhetta. She is a Professor and teaching landscape architecture at the Norwegian university of Life Sciences at Ås, and is also a AxJohnson Guest Professor at SUDes Masters Program in Sustainable Urban Design at the Lund University in Sweden.

Jens Linnet

Jens Linnet is co-founder and Creative Director of landscape design studio BOGL with offices in Denmark and Norway.

Through his more than 20 years of experience as a landscape architect, Jens has developed a particular ability to create vivid, beautiful, and functional projects and landscapes that take their departure in the particular qualities and resources of the surroundings.

Jevgeniy Bluwstein

Jevgeniy Bluwstein is a political ecologist and anthropologist, currently Ambizione Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern. He leads a Swiss National Science Foundation project on the juridification of climate politics through activism and litigation, exploring how courts, movements, and the state reshape climate governance and civil liberties. Previously a lecturer at the University of Fribourg, he holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen on the political ecology of conservation in Tanzania, focusing on land and resource conflicts around protected areas. His work has appeared in the Journal of Political Ecology, World Development, Journal of Agrarian Change, and Geoforum.

Jill Casid

Jill H. Casid is an artist, theorist, and historian, professor of Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Their work engages queer, crip, trans*feminist, and decolonial aesthetics across writing, photography, and film. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire (2005) and Scenes of Projection (2015), and co-editor of Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (2014). Current research explores aesthetics in the “Necrocene” and the politics of form under conditions of crisis. Casid’s scholarship and artistic practice together challenge and reframe the politics of landscape, empire, and visual culture.

Joan Iverson Nassauer

Joan Iverson Nassauer is an American landscape architect and scholar specializing in ecological design. Her research focuses on how cultural norms and perceptions of care shape the success of ecological landscapes. She has published widely, including Placing Nature (1997), and her work has influenced green infrastructure, watershed management, and ecological restoration. Nassauer is a Fellow of ASLA and CELA and has been recognized internationally for linking design, ecology, and social science. Her research emphasizes the role of aesthetics in making ecological function socially legible and politically viable. Notably, her seminal essay Messy Ecosystems Orderly Frames (1994) is widely cited and remains relevant to this day.

João Nunes

João Nunes is the general coordinator of PROAP, an internationally recognized landscape architecture firm with offices in Portugal, Italy and Angola.

Johan Huizinga

Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history. His most famous work, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), combined aesthetics, culture, and history in a vivid portrait of late medieval Europe. In Homo Ludens (1938), he proposed play as a primary formative element of human culture, a concept still influential in cultural studies. Critical of fascism, he was detained during Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. Huizinga’s legacy lies in bridging history, culture, and aesthetics in ways that continue to inform humanistic scholarship.

John Cage

John Cage (1912–1992), American composer and theorist, unsettled the very definition of music. A student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, yet shaped more deeply by Zen and the I Ching, he pioneered indeterminacy, electroacoustic experimentation, and the prepared piano. His infamous 4′33″ (1952) reframed silence as sound, demanding that audiences listen to the environment itself as composition. Cage described music as “purposeless play,” not an ordering of chaos but a wakefulness to life as it happens. His work remains both scandal and revelation—an art of chance that turns listening into philosophy.

John Dixon Hunt

John Dixon Hunt (b. 1936) is a preeminent historian of gardens and landscapes whose intellectual path began in English literature before turning toward the cultural histories of designed nature. At the University of Pennsylvania, where he later chaired landscape architecture, he forged a body of scholarship that threads together poetics, history, and the aesthetics of space. His books—Garden and Grove, Greater Perfections, The Afterlife of Gardens, among many others—map the garden as both a cultural artifact and a site of imagination, commemoration, and utopian projection. Hunt’s writings cultivate a vision of gardens not as static forms but as restless mediations between art, memory, and the evolving conditions of place.

Jolle Roelofs

Jolle Roelofs is an imaginative multi-instrumentalist and composer / designer from the Netherlands. His eclectic piano-based compositions range seamlessly across genres like film, pop, electronic, and jazz. Jolle thrives on collaboration, often working with theater groups, bands, and multimedia performances. With an open improvisational approach, Jolle composes on location, allowing the music to organically evolve alongside other artists. His conservatory training in piano and music theater composition shines through in his layered, cinematic soundscapes.

Jonathan Cane

Jonathan Cane is a South African art historian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pretoria. His research examines minor architectures and infrastructures along the N4/EN4 highway between South Africa and Mozambique, and he leads the SSRC-funded project Sounding the Monsoon. He is the author of Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld (2019), a queer postcolonial study of gardening in Johannesburg. His work spans writing, video, installation, and web-based projects, often addressing queerness, memory, and landscape. Cane’s practice situates everyday landscapes within broader political and ecological histories.

Joost Emmerik

Joost Emmerik (b. 1979) is a Dutch garden and landscape architect known for his serene, restrained designs that emphasize robust materials and lush planting. His work treats the garden as an autonomous world, equal to the house, shaped by clarity and quiet growth over time. Emmerik heads the Master’s program in Landscape Architecture at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and lectures across the Netherlands. He collaborates widely with artists, architects, and designers on cross-disciplinary projects. His practice insists on the enduring power of gardens in contemporary life.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Juhani Pallasmaa (b. 1936) is a Finnish architect, theorist, and educator whose writings have deeply influenced architectural and design thinking. His seminal book The Eyes of the Skin (1996) argues for a multisensory understanding of perception, embodiment, and the body in architecture. A prolific author and lecturer, he has written extensively on cultural philosophy, existential space, and environmental psychology. Pallasmaa’s work critiques the dominance of vision in design and calls for a more tactile, phenomenological approach. His ideas remain essential in rethinking architecture and landscape as lived, sensory, and poetic.

Julie Bargmann

Julie Bargmann (b. 1958) is an American landscape architect and educator, founding principal of D.I.R.T. Studio and Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia. Her practice is known for radical reuse of post-industrial and contaminated sites, transforming “ugly ducklings” into productive, socially engaged landscapes. Bargmann was the inaugural recipient of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize in 2021. Her work embraces post-industrial terrains, adaptive reuse, and design as provocation. Through both practice and teaching, she has shaped a generation of ecological and critical designers.

Kamel Louafi

Kamel Louafi, born in Algeria, studied topography in Algeria and France. He worked at the Ministry of Forest Inventory and Land Development in Algeria, was drawer at the architectural office of his elder brother M.S. Louafi. From 1980 to 1986, he studied Landscape Architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. During those years, he freelanced on several projects in Luxembourg and in Berlin. In 1996, he founded his own office, Kamel Loaufi Landscape Architects in Berlin. Since 2000, he is a curator member at Aedes/Berlin.

Katarina Bajc

Katarina Bajc was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia where she studied Fine Arts Education at the University of Ljubljana, from 2002 to 2007 and later also Landscape Architecture at University of Ljubljana from 2005 to 2010. She was exchange student at Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Sciences at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany in 2008/9. She later moved to Munich, where she finished Master in Landscape architecture at Technical University Munich, Germany in 2013. She worked in landscape architecture and urban planning offices in Germany and Portugal, as well as in art galleries in Slovenia from 2005-2015. In 2015 she was Teaching and Research Assistant at Technical University in Munich, Chair for Landscape Architecture and industrial Landscapes. She received a Fulbright scholarship for the Year 2015/16 which allowed her to pursue research in the field of ecological aesthetics in landscape architecture at Berkeley College for Environmental Design at University of California. From 2016-2017 she held a teaching and research position at the Institute of Landscape Planning and Ecology at the University of Stuttgart. Currently, Katarina is a researcher at HafenCity University in Hamburg.

Kathryn Moore

Kathryn Moore is a British landscape architect, theorist, and educator, Professor at Birmingham City University and past President of IFLA and the Landscape Institute. She is the author of Overlooking the Visual (2010), a book challenging visual primacy and reframing aesthetics in design. Moore is the creator of the West Midlands National Park project, which redefines landscape as a driver of governance, health, and climate resilience. She has been recognized for leadership in connecting landscape with culture, policy, and large-scale transformation. Her work exemplifies landscape as a discipline of imagination and systemic change.

Keller Easterling

Architect, urbanist, and writer, Easterling is Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture and Director of the MED program at Yale. Her books—Medium Design (2021) and Extrastatecraft (2014)—examine infrastructure, organization, and global spatial systems, positioning design as a way of working through complexity rather than producing fixed solutions. A recipient of the Schelling Architecture Theory Award and the United States Artists Award, she is recognized as a leading theorist of infrastructure space and global urbanism.

Kelly Shannon

Kelly Shannon is Professor of Urbanism at the University of Leuven. Her research and practice have long been rooted in Southeast Asia, with a sustained engagement in Vietnam. She currently investigates the intersections of landscape and urbanism in the context of climate change, focusing on spatial strategies that respond to global warming.

Kenneth Olwig

Kenneth Olwig (b. 1946) is a landscape geographer known for advancing a “substantive” view of landscape that includes legal and political dimensions beyond aesthetics. A professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, his key works include Nature’s Ideological Landscape (1984), Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic (2002), and The Meanings of Landscape (2019).

Kevin Lynch

Kevin Lynch (1918–1984), American urban planner and theorist, redefined how cities are perceived and lived through his studies of mental mapping and temporal form. In The Image of the City (1960) and What Time is This Place? (1972), he examined how urban environments construct memory and frame collective time. At MIT, where he taught for three decades, Lynch shaped generations of designers to see cities not only as infrastructures but as lived, imagined geographies.

Klaske Havik

Klaske Havik is Professor of Architecture, Methods of Analysis and Imagination at Delft University of Technology.
She has developed a distinct research approach relating architectural and urban questions (such as the use, experience and imagination of place) to literary language. Her book “Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture” (2014, Spanish edition 2016) proposes a literary approach to architecture and urban regeneration, proposing the three notions description, transcription and prescription. Havik initiated the 2nd International Conference on Architecture and Fiction “Writingplace. Literary Methods in Architectural Research and Design” (TU Delft 2013), and the Writingplace Journal for Architecture and Literature. Havik writes regularly for architectural, literary and cultural magazines and was editor of the Dutch-Belgian peer reviewed architecture journal OASE. She co-edited, with Tom Avermaete and Hans Teerds, the anthology Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere, (SUN 2009). Havik’s literary work appeared in Dutch poetry collections and literary magazines. For her contribution to the architectural debate, she received the Dutch Architect of the Year Award in 2014. She was Visiting Professor of Architecture, Public Building at TU Tampere (Finland) in 2015-2017. Currently, Havik is Action Chair of the European COST network Writing Urban Places, New Narratives for the European City.

Kristoffer Holm Pedersen

Lacaton & Vassal

Founded in 1987 by Anne Lacaton (b. 1955) and Jean-Philippe Vassal (b. 1954), the Paris-based office is renowned for transformative approaches to housing, cultural institutions, and public spaces. Their practice is defined by a radical economy of means, privileging reuse, adaptability, and generosity of space—most notably in their celebrated social housing renovations. Both trained in Bordeaux, with Vassal’s early years in Niger shaping their ethic of doing “nearly everything with nothing.” Awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2021, Lacaton & Vassal remain key figures in contemporary architectural debates on sustainability, equity, and the future of dwelling.

Lars Hopstock

Lars Hopstock is Junior Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU). He has many years of professional practice and has been a research and teaching associate at various German universities since 2010. In 2015, he earned his doctorate from the University of Sheffield. His interests range from the philosophy of nature to current issues of urban open spaces and posthumanism. His research chiefly focuses on the landscape architecture of the twentieth century at the intersection of the history of ideas, landscape theory, architecture, gardens, and art.

Laura Cipriani

Laura Cipriani is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Delft University of Technology and a founder of Superlandscape, a landscape and urban design firm. She holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Urbanism from IUAV, a master’s degree in landscape and urban issues from Harvard GSD, and a master’s in Architecture from IUAV. Her current research addresses climate change issues, starting from the materiality of water and soil, and adopting (co)design approaches. She authored and edited several books, including recently “Fluid Soils. (Co)Designing for the Wadden Sea Landscapes”. This year, “(Co)Designing Hope: Aqueous Landscapes in Transition” was published with Routledge, featuring numerous projects and research on the “body of water,” including contributions by landscape architects, geographers, academics, engineers, and artists.

Laura Menatti

Laura Menatti is a researcher with a PhD in aesthetics from the University of Pavia and a second PhD in philosophy of globalisation from the University of the Basque Country.

Her primary research focuses on environmental philosophy, landscape philosophy, and the philosophy of medicine. Through interdisciplinary analysis, she explores social and political dimensions, as well as environmental ethics, with particular emphasis on landscape management in the context of climate change. Her work also encompasses the perception of landscape and the environment from both historical and cognitive science perspectives.

Currently, she aims to bridge environmental philosophy and the philosophy of medicine through the concepts of salutogenesis and adaptivity.

She has been teaching and carrying out her research in different faculties and departments (medicine, architecture, philosophy, science) in Spain, Chile, Italy and France.

Laurie Olin

Laurie Olin (b. 1938) is an American landscape architect whose practice spans gardens, campuses, and monumental public spaces. Founding partner of OLIN, his works and writings combine precision of form with humanist sensitivity, from essays on transforming the commonplace to memoirs of the English landscape. As professor at Penn and Harvard, Olin has long mediated between practice and pedagogy, situating landscape design within histories both intimate and civic.

Lawrence Halprin

Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) was an American landscape architect, designer, and teacher whose work shaped postwar public space in the United States. His projects—from Ghirardelli Square to the Nicollet Mall and the Seattle World’s Fair—emphasized user experience, choreography of movement, and collaborative design. Together with his wife, dancer Anna Halprin, he explored the ties between choreography and body in public landscapes. Halprin’s definition of modernism foregrounded holistic environmental design, attentive to both individuals and social groups. He remains a central figure in modern landscape architecture, remembered for narrative and participatory design.

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier (1887–1965), born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, and writer. Naturalized French in 1930, he became one of the pioneers of modern architecture. He co-founded CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) and developed influential ideas about housing, functionalist design, and the modern city, exemplified in his master plan for Chandigarh, India. His works—including iconic buildings, urban plans, and furniture—sought to reconcile modern life with rationalized, standardized design. While celebrated for shaping modernism, Le Corbusier remains controversial for his ties to authoritarian politics and his top-down urban visions. In 2016, seventeen of his works were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as an “Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement.”

Leberecht Migge

Leberecht Migge (1881–1935) was a German landscape architect, regional planner, and writer whose polemical advocacy for social gardening reshaped the Siedlungswesen (settlement movement) during the Weimar Republic. He emphasized productive gardens, urban agriculture, and communal landscapes as tools for social reform. Migge’s work, neglected for decades, has recently regained attention for its resonance with sustainability, self-sufficiency, and ecological urbanism.

Léon van Geest

Léon van Geest is an expert on green roofs, urban biodiversity, and sustainable urban design and planning. He is based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and is one of the founders and the director of Rotterdamse Dakendagen (Rotterdam Rooftop Days), an annual event that promotes the use of rooftops for a variety of purposes, such as urban agriculture, biodiversity, and social gatherings.

Levi Bryant

Levi Bryant is an American philosopher best known for his role in developing object-oriented ontology (OOO) and his variant, “onticology.” His work departs from anthropocentrism, emphasizing the autonomy of objects and their split between virtual potential and actual qualities. Bryant’s blog Larval Subjects and books such as Difference and Givenness (2008) position him among thinkers engaging Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, and Žižek. He initially coined “OOO” to distinguish his stance from Graham Harman’s, later evolving toward a “machine-oriented ontology.” His philosophy has resonated with designers and theorists seeking non-human-centered ontologies for posthumanist and ecological thought.

Liam Young

Liam Young is a speculative architect and filmmaker who explores the global systems and landscapes that sustain everyday technologies. With Kate Davies, he co-runs the Unknown Fields project, tracing supply chains behind objects such as phones, clothes, and batteries. He directs the MA in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc, and curated Views of Planet City for Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an exhibition reimagining planetary futures through art and design.

Libby Robin

Libby Robin is an Australian historian of science and environmental ideas, Emeritus Professor at the Fenner School, Australian National University. Her research spans the history of ecology, environmental humanities, and comparative environmental history. She is the author of award-winning books including How a Continent Created a Nation, Boom and Bust, and The Flight of the Emu. Robin has held senior research roles at the National Museum of Australia and KTH Stockholm. Her work bridges science, history, and culture to address ecological futures.

Lilly Reich

Lilly Reich (1885–1947) was a German designer of textiles, furniture, interiors, and exhibitions. From 1925 to 1938, she collaborated closely with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, co-developing iconic modernist designs. Her significant contributions to the Modern Movement were only fully recognized posthumously.

Lisa Diedrich

Lisa Diedrich is a German-born landscape architect, and has taught widely across Europe and beyond, focusing on landscape theory, urbanism, and design research. As editor-in-chief of Landscape Architecture Europe (LAE) and co-editor of ’scape, she has played a key role in shaping professional discourse in Europe and internationally. Her editorial work has foregrounded emerging themes in landscape architecture and ecology, giving visibility to contemporary practice. Diedrich is recognized as both an academic leader and a critical voice in the discipline. She is a recepient of the LILA 2023 Honour Award.

Lois Weinberger

Lois Weinberger (1947–2020) was an Austrian artist whose work foregrounded ruderal plants, migration, and the politics of marginal ecologies. Calling himself a “field worker,” he used drawings, notes, installations, and plant transfers to reveal the hidden agency of weeds in urban and cultural systems. His Burning and Walking (1993/1997) opened asphalt surfaces to spontaneous vegetation and became influential for landscape architects—most notably inspiring Wagon Landscaping’s experiments with asphalt ecologies, among others. At documenta X he planted neophytes along railway tracks, turning vegetation into a metaphor for migration and displacement. Weinberger’s work contributed significantly to debates on art, ecology, and the politics of public space.

Louis le Roy

Louis Le Roy was a Dutch artist, landscape architect, and ecological thinker who sought to free design from rigid planning and return it to the dynamics of self-organization. Trained as an artist, he became a fierce critic of top-down urbanism, instead advocating for spaces where human and nonhuman agencies co-create over time. His experimental works, especially in Heerenveen, became living laboratories of disorder, growth, and decay—an “ecological aesthetics” rooted in duration rather than instant form. Le Roy remains a radical voice in European landscape discourse, insisting that the true task of design is to cultivate conditions for ongoing life rather than to impose fixed compositions.

Louise Agassiz

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–1873) was a Swiss-American biologist and geologist, known for founding glaciology and advancing zoological classification. He taught at Harvard and founded its Museum of Comparative Zoology, contributing major multi-volume works on natural history. Agassiz emphasized observational rigor and produced influential studies of extinct species, including megalodon. However, his theories of polygenism and links to scientific racism mark a controversial legacy. His career reflects both the expansion of 19th-century natural science and its entanglement with problematic ideologies.

Lucia Tozzi

Lucia Tozzi is a Milano-based journalist and urban researcher known for her incisive critiques of gentrification, tourism-driven development, and the commodification of public space. Her writing spans cultural criticism, investigative reporting, and political analysis, appearing in publications such as Il Tascabile, NERO, Altreconomia, il manifesto, and other journals. She is the editor and author of City Killers. Per una critica del turismo (2023, Libria), Dopo il turismo (2020, nottetempo), and co-author of Napoli. Contro il panorama, (2022, nottetempo), which reframes Naples as a space of potential outside the logic of global urban competition. Her work draws on radical urban theory and foregrounds the defence of the commons, democratic planning, and the rights of residents over speculative capital.

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud (1922–2011, UK) – British painter and draughtsman, celebrated as one of the leading portraitists of the 20th century. Initially influenced by surrealism and expressionism, he turned to a raw, unsparing realism in the 1950s. Over a six-decade career, he produced thickly worked, psychologically intense portraits—often of friends and family—marked by stark interiors, urban settings, and the demanding endurance of his sitters. His work probes the tension between painter and subject with unsettling intimacy.

Lucius Burckhardt

Lucius Burckhardt (1925–2003), Swiss sociologist, design theorist, and cultural critic, co-developed Strollology (Promenadologie) with Annemarie Burckhardt, a method for reflecting on how landscapes are perceived through walking. He held influential teaching positions in architecture and urban studies and was active as editor, organizer, and institutional leader. His writings critiqued the unseen structures shaping design and planning, linking ecology, perception, and society. Burckhardt’s work continues to inform debates on how design frames experience.

Luigi Latini

Luigi Latini is a landscape architect and teaches Landscape Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Arts at the Iuav University in Venice. He has conducted research on landscape and gardens at the University of Florence, where he was awarded a PhD in Landscape Design in 2001; he has been associated with the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche in Treviso since 1998, and he is currently chairman of the Scientific Committee for Landscape Studies and the Carlo Scarpa International Prize for Gardens, and member of the board with the position of director.

Lydia Kallipoliti

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, scholar, and an Associate Professor directing the MS in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University GSAPP. Prior to Columbia, Kallipoliti was an Associate Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union in New York, where she also served as a Senior Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Design, and as the Feltman Chair in Lighting. She also taught at Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Syracuse University, the University of Technology Sydney and served as a Visiting Fellow at the Canadian Center of Architecture and the University of Queensland in Australia.

Kallipoliti’s research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics and more particularly on recycling material experiments, theories of waste and reuse, as well as closed and self-reliant systems and urban environments. Her work is presented in a variety of media including online digital platforms, lexicons, databases and archives, exhibitions and holographic animations, with the scope of engaging a wide audience in what she calls ‘immersive scholarship.’

Lynda H. Schneekloth

Lynda H. Schneekloth is professor emerita at the School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo, and an associate of the Urban Design Project. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of landscape, history, and civic engagement, particularly around water and energy infrastructures. She contributed significantly to making visible the cultural and ecological histories of the Niagara River and hydroelectric landscapes, combining design with advocacy and public negotiation.

M. Paul Friedberg

Born in New York City, M. Paul Friedberg (1931-2025) earned a B.S. in 1954 in ornamental horticulture at Cornell University. In his hometown, he established M. Paul Friedberg and Associates, now known as MPFP with Rick Parisi as the principal. Over the years, he emerged as a leading landscape architect, especially celebrated for his adventure playgrounds and public spaces. He was the founder of the landscape architecture program at City College of New York and an inspiring teacher. His colleagues describe him as a maverick, breaking the boundaries of possible, creating opportunities for minorities and joy for the city.

Maano Ramutsindela

Maano Ramutsindela is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cape Town and UP-UCT Future Africa Research Chair in Sustainability Transformations. His work focuses on socioecological relations and the political ecology of peace parks. Author of Transfrontier Conservation in Africa and co-editor of The Violence of Conservation in Africa (2022), he has held visiting positions at Harvard, Geneva, and Macalester College.

Mads Birgens

Head of Urbanism at Cobe in Copenhagen.
Trained architect from Aarhus School of Architecture, DK. Gained unique experience in Urban Transformation from leading a large number of Cobe’s award winning masterplan projects: Nordhavn – Copenhagen, Deutzer Hafen – Cologne, Høje Taastrup C – Copenhagen, Nydalen – Oslo, Nyhavna – Trondheim and Brøndby Strand – Copenhagen.
Part of Cobe since 2006, currently responsible for driving the professional development of urban and strategic planning, parallel to a hands on involvement in project development. Highly experienced in contextual design for public spaces, climate adaption, mobility planning, landscape design – transforming cities towards a more futureproof urbanism.
Driven by leading innovative processes, internal as well as external, based on the right mix of digital and analogue tools. Experienced from teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copehagen, The University of Lund in Sweden and lecturing nationally and internationally on Cobe’s design philosophy and current projects.

Manfredo Tafuri

Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) was an Italian architectural historian, critic, and leading figure of the Venice School. In Architecture and Utopia (1973), he argued that modernism’s socially oriented ambitions were bound to fail because architecture cannot resolve systemic contradictions of capitalism. Instead, architecture inevitably serves broader ideological structures. His class critique dismantled illusions of architecture’s autonomy and helped pave the way for postmodernist discourse. Tafuri remains a central reference in architectural historiography and theory.

Marc Antrop

Marc Antrop (born 1946, Belgium)
Geographer and emeritus professor at Ghent University, Antrop is a leading figure in landscape sciences, specializing in GIS, remote sensing, and planning. His work integrates natural and cultural processes in the study of European landscapes, with a focus on perception, evaluation, and environmental assessment. He received the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for Landscape Ecology (2003) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Tartu (2007).

Marc Desportes

Marc Desportes is a French civil engineer, urban planner, and scholar of the intersections between technology, culture, and space. His work traces how infrastructures such as transport reshape perception and landscape experience across history, most notably in Paysages en mouvement (2005).

Marc Treib

Marc Treib (CA, USA), professor emeritus of architecture at UC Berkeley, is an influential historian and critic of modern landscape architecture and design. He authored Space Calculated in Seconds and Sanctuaries of Spanish New Mexico, co-authored Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living, and edited An Everyday Modernism and Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review. His research spans Japanese gardens, Eliel Saarinen’s urbanism, and the works of Christopher Tunnard, Sutemi Horiguchi, and Luis Barragán. Honors include Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rome fellowships, as well as ASLA and Society of Architectural Historians awards.

Marco Casagrande

Marco Casagrande is a Finnish architect, biourbanist, social theorist, and professor of architecture.

By mixing environmentalism and urban design, Casagrande is developing methods of Urban Acupuncture to create ecologically sustainable urban development towards the so-called Third Generation City. He is Vice President of International Society of Biourbanism and Principal of the Casagrande Laboratory, internationally operating architecture, biourbanism, and innovation office based in Helsinki, Finland.

He is the laureate of the UNESCO Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, European Prize for Architecture, among others. His works have been exhibited in the Venice Architecture Biennale. Casagrande is holding professorships at the Tamkang University in Taiwan, Bergen School of Architecture in Norway, and O.M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy and King Danylo universities in Ukraine.

Margherita Cisani

Margherita Cisani (Bergamo, Italy) is a geographer whose research focuses on urban landscapes and sustainable mobility practices. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Padua and a Master’s degree from the University of Turin (2010), with expertise in cartography and GIS gained through professional work and an internship at the Spatial Analysis Centre of Yellowstone National Park (2011–2012). She has contributed to research on sustainable urban mobility, EU-funded projects, and protected areas in Abruzzo, and collaborates with the Municipality of Bergamo as operational secretary of the Bergamo Smart City & Community Association. She is currently based at the Università degli Studi di Padova.

Marie Tharp

Marie Tharp (1920–2006, USA), cartographer of the unseen, Tharp brought the ocean floor into view through her pioneering maps, revealing mid‑ocean ridges and subaqueous topographies that confirmed continental drift. Working largely behind the scenes due to gender exclusion, she translated sonar data into detailed landscapes of the deep, fundamentally remaking scientific understanding of Earth’s hidden terrains. Her legacy persists in each contour line of planetary renewal.

Marina Cervera

Marina Cervera is a landscape architect and urban planner from Barcelona, Spain. She is the CEO of NABLABCN, Executive Director of the International Landscape Biennial of Barcelona and part part-time teacher at UPC-BarcelonaTech.

Marina holds comprehensive dual professional qualifications in both landscape architecture and urbanism. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and a Bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture at UPC-BarcelonaTech, followed by a Master’s in Landscape Architecture in 2003 and a Master’s in Urbanism Research in 2014. This integrated training across disciplines informs her approach to territorial and urban design, bridging scales from site-specific interventions to metropolitan planning.

Before establishing her own practice, Marina worked at Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Paris and at the UPC Research & Landscape Projects Center under Rosa Barba. She founded NABLABCN in 2003, which has grown into a highly recognised practice with numerous competition wins and international awards. The practice’s work on Barcelona’s urban transformation has received significant recognition, most notably winning the New European Bauhaus Prize in the 2025 WINNER CHAMPIONS category for the Green Axes and Squares of Barcelona’s Eixample project. This transformative work, which includes the Girona Street Axis, was selected for the Premi Espai Públic CCCB and received the Premi Catalunya d’Urbanisme Manuel de Solà-Morales ex aequo, awarded by the Catalan Society for Territorial Planning in 2023. These projects exemplify innovative approaches to retrofitting historic urban fabric with ecological infrastructure and reimagining public space for contemporary urban life.

Marina has coordinated the Barcelona Landscape Biennial since its 4th edition and currently serves on both its Executive and Scientific Committees, playing a pivotal role in its evolution from a regional academic event to an internationally recognized professional platform. She teaches at UPC-BarcelonaTech and has been invited as guest lecturer, moderator, and jury member at universities and institutions worldwide. Her work has been recognized with prestigious fellowships and scholarships, including the Mies van der Rohe Foundation Fellowship, the Caixa d’Arquitectes Scholarship, the Villa LeNôtre Fellowship in 2016, and the Luigi Einaudi Chair at Cornell University in 2019. Marina’s practice bridges professional innovation, academic research, and institutional leadership, contributing to the articulation and advancement of landscape architecture across scales and through international discourse.

Marit Noest

Landscape architect and project leader at Karres en Brands.
Working on complex assignments and acquisitions in NL and abroad. Making landscape-based visions, plans, researches and storylines, and translating them to interventions and experiences on human scale. In KB my aim is to further develop our design research and knowledge sharing in and outside of the office. Responsible for the selection of interns, my aim is to further develop the ties with students and universities in the Netherlands and abroad.

Registered landscape architect and MSc in Landscape architecture from Wageningen University. Specifically interested in social justice in public space and combination of landscape and film.Landscape architect and project leader at Karres en Brands. Working on complex assignments and acquisitions in NL and abroad. Making landscape-based visions, plans, researches and storylines, and translating them to interventions and experiences on human scale. In KB my aim is to further develop our design research and knowledge sharing in and outside of the office. Responsible for the selection of interns, my aim is to further develop the ties with students and universities in the Netherlands and abroad. Registered landscape architect and MSc in Landscape architecture from Wageningen University. Specifically interested in social justice in public space and combination of landscape and film.

Martín Arboleda

Martín Arboleda is a Chilean sociologist whose work investigates the planetary dimensions of capitalism, infrastructure, and extraction. In Planetary Mine (2020), he shows how mining territories in Latin America are embedded in global circuits of value, labor, and ecology. His research connects critical political economy with extended urbanization, agri-food systems, and climate crisis, bridging sociology, geography, and design discourse. Arboleda’s writing positions landscapes of extraction as both material grounds and conceptual laboratories for rethinking capitalism.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose phenomenology of “being-in-the-world” deeply influenced architectural and landscape theory. In Being and Time (1927), he analyzed Dasein—the condition of human existence—as always situated, embodied, and entangled with its environment. Heidegger’s concepts of dwelling, place, and the poetic revealing of being continue to shape design discourses, though his association with National Socialism remains a profound ethical and intellectual controversy. His thinking on ontology and perception informs debates on estrangement, authenticity, and landscape experience.

Martin Hogue

Martin Hogue is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. He is the author of Thirtyfour Campgrounds (MIT Press, 2016) and Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping’s Most Essential Items and Activities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2023).

Trained as an architect and landscape architect and working primarily with analytical drawings as a mode of inquiry, his research explores the notion of site as a cultural construction — specifically, the mechanisms by which locations become invested with the unique potential to acquire the designation of “site”.

Martin Prominski

Martin Prominski is full professor and chair of Designing Urban Landscapes at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. After three years of apprenticeship and work experience as a landscape gardener, he studied landscape planning at the TU Berlin and received a Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University, GSD. He has a PhD from the TU Berlin (2003). His current research focuses on design research strategies, new concepts of nature and culture in the Anthropocene, and landscape architectural strategies to address the challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change. He is a registered landscape architect and co-founded mesh landscape architects, Hannover/Tokyo in 2018 with three partners.

Martin Rein-Cano

Martin Rein-Cano was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. He studied Art History at Frankfurt University and Landscape Architecture at the Technical Universities of Hannover and Karlsruhe. He trained in the office of Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz in San Francisco. In 1996, he founded TOPOTEK 1. He leads a wide variety of international projects and has achieved the first prize in various competitions. Several professional books and articles have been published exclusively on his work, which has been honoured with many awards and prizes. Martin Rein-Cano has been appointed as a guest professor in Europe and North America. He frequently lectures at internationally renowned universities and cultural institutions and regularly serves on competition juries.

Mary Midgley

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) was a British philosopher known for her fierce critiques of reductionism and scientism. She argued for understanding humans as animals within nature, writing influential works such as Beast and Man and Animals and Why They Matter. Midgley challenged Richard Dawkins and other popular science figures, insisting on the moral and cultural limits of scientific explanation. She also wrote in support of a moral interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis. Remembered as a combative thinker, she became one of Britain’s most visible public philosophers.

Mary Miss

Mary Miss (b. 1944) is an American artist and designer working across art, architecture, and landscape. Her installations often foreground overlooked infrastructures and environmental processes, engaging publics in active interpretation of place. Collaborating with scientists, planners, and administrators, she develops site-specific works that function simultaneously as ecological interventions and cultural narratives. Miss’s projects are foundational in positioning environmental art as a discursive practice of civic engagement.

masharu

masharu is an earth eater and earth lover, founder of the Museum of Edible Earth. Their projects weave scientific research, personal inquiry and cultural practices. With a PhD in Mathematics (2011) and a degree from the Photo Academy Amsterdam, masharu later joined residencies at the Rijksakademie (2013–14) and NIAS-KNAW (2018). Their artistic and scientific work has been shown in over 30 countries, including Ars Electronica Linz, the World Soil Museum Wageningen, the African Artists’ Foundation Lagos and the Jakarta Contemporary Ceramics Biennale. masharu has received awards such as the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction and YouFab Global Creative Award, with support from the Mondriaan Fund.

Massimo Negrotti

Massimo Negrotti (b. 1944) is an Italian scholar and professor of Social Science Methodology. He directs IMES-LCA at the University of Urbino, focusing on the culture of the artificial. His works, including Capire l’artificiale and La terza realtà, develop a theory of artificiality that bridges technology, design, and sociology. Negrotti has been a major figure in articulating how artificial environments shape modern society. His approach continues to influence debates on virtuality and design culture.

Matej Blenkuš

Matej Blenkuš is an associate professor and dean at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana where he teaches subject Structures and Design Studio. He is also a member of the doctoral studies committee. He heads a architectural design office abiro and is a member of Architectural association of Ljubljana and a Chamber for architecture and spatial planning of Slovenia. He graduated and received his PhD at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana. His Master Thesis, submitted at the Helsinki University of Technology (today Aalto University) was awarded as a master thesis of the year 1999. He took part in many national opened and invited design competitions where together with coauthors he won many awards and honorable mentions. He has more than 15 years of experience in architectural design. Nordic center Planica was awarded with Plečnik’s Prize in 2016, Municipal library Grosuplje with Plečnik’s Recognition in 2007 and Multipurpose building Šmartinka with Zupančič’s prize of city of Ljubljana in 2002. Together with prof. Miloš Florijančič, he was awarded the Platinum Pencil award by the Chamber for architecture and spatial planning. Some of his other works were many times among the national selection for the European award Mies van der Rohe. His work are published in many domestic and international magazines. He gave lectures on the Days of Oris in Zagreb and the Piran Days of Architecture, but also at the faculties and conferences in Graz, Zagreb, Split and Frankfurt. The works of abiro were exhibited in 2002 and 2008 in the Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana and published in a monograph in 2015 by the Museum of architecture and design Slovenia.

Mateja Kurir

Mateja Kurir (Slovenia), philosopher and critic, earned her PhD from the University of Ljubljana. She is the author of Arhitektura moderne in das Unheimliche (2018) and co-editor of On Power in Architecture and Garden As Metaphor, receiving two Plečnik Medals for her contributions to architectural theory and criticism. She has held research positions at KU Leuven and the University of Rijeka and collaborates with academic and artistic institutions while contributing essays, books, and radio programs.

Matt Edgeworth

UK archaeologist and honorary visiting fellow at the University of Leicester, Edgeworth brings a sensibility of flow to archaeological strata. His work probes the “archaeosphere” of manmade ground—where human-made sediments echo ecological, technological, and political forces. Through attention to fluidity, waste, and hidden material histories, he redefines how landscape archives shape collective futures.

Matthijs Schouten

Matthijs G.C. Schouten (born 1952, Netherlands) is a Dutch ecologist and philosopher working at the intersections of ecology, cultural history, and environmental philosophy. Professor at Wageningen University and University College Cork, and long associated with Staatsbosbeheer, he is renowned for his expertise on Irish peatlands and for probing the cultural and spiritual dimensions of human–nature relations. Trained in plant ecology under Victor Westhoff, Schouten’s inquiry extends into comparative religion and Eastern philosophy, shaping his vision of landscape as both ecological system and cultural construct. His writings—such as Mirror of Nature and The Position of Silent Nature—explore how perceptions of nature inform practices of conservation and restoration. A Buddhist and a vegetarian, he foregrounds ethics, spirituality, and stewardship in ecological thought.

Max Weber

Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German sociologist, historian, and political economist, widely regarded as one of the founding figures of sociology. His Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism linked religion to the rise of modern capitalism, while his lectures Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation defined modern intellectual life. Weber analyzed rationalization, secularization, and disenchantment as core processes of modernity. He also theorized forms of social authority—charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal—and defined the state by its monopoly on violence. His work remains central to sociology, political theory, and the study of modern society.

Menno Cramer

With over 10 years of experience in combining neuroscience and design, Menno is passionate about understanding how people think and interact with well-designed objects and services. He uses his unique skills to improve products and customer experiences across various industries and domains.

As the Head of Solution Delivery at OutSystems, Menno leads a diverse team of 80+ professionals to develop innovative solutions that meet both individual user needs and business objectives. He oversees around 30 global projects at any given time, demonstrating strong multitasking and organisational abilities. By facilitating cross-functional teamwork and open communication, he contributes to project success and delivers meaningful results to clients across the globe.

Michael Jakob

Michael Jakob is a Swiss scholar who teaches history and theory of landscape at institutions including the Accademia di Mendrisio, Politecnico di Milano, and Grenoble University. His research explores landscape aesthetics, perception, vertigo, and ways of seeing, while also curating exhibitions and producing documentary films. Jakob has authored influential books such as 100 Paysages, The Swiss Touch in Landscape Architecture, and La poétique du banc. He is editor of COMPAR(A)ISON and the mountain culture series di monte in monte. His work bridges theory, literature, and landscape culture with a poetic sensibility.

Michael van Gessel

Michael van Gessel is a Dutch landscape architect, a renowned figure in the global community of landscape architecture, whose projects we are most proud to feature on Landezine. We met with Mr. van Gessel at the 8th International Biennial of Landscape Architecture in Barcelona, in September 2014, where he was the president of the Jury for the Rosa Barba Prize. His work as a landscape architect is based on a very subtle and simple, yet determined, intervention in landscape. As he puts it: “With a minimum effort for a maximum effect.”

Michael Van Valkenburgh

Michael Van Valkenburgh (b. 1951)

Michael Van Valkenburgh is an American landscape architect, founder of MVVA, and Professor Emeritus at Harvard GSD. His firm’s projects include Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Lower Don Lands in Toronto, and the Obama Presidential Center landscape. Van Valkenburgh’s work ranges from gardens to large urban parks, always attentive to ecology and public life. His firm has won the ASLA Firm of the Year Award and many other honors. He is recognized as one of the leading contemporary figures in landscape architecture. He is the winner of the LILA 2024 Honour Award.

Michel Corajoud

Michel Corajoud (1937–2014, France) – French landscape architect, regarded as a founder of the discipline’s renewal in the late 20th century. Trained at the École des Arts Décoratifs, he collaborated with Jacques Simon and later co-directed a practice with Claire Corajoud, his partner in life and work. Corajoud’s projects and writings emphasized continuity between architecture and the open spaces of the city, challenging the horticultural bias of earlier generations. In 2003, he was awarded the Grand Prix de l’urbanisme, affirming the centrality of landscape to contemporary urbanism.

Michel de Certeau

Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) was a French Jesuit priest, historian, and philosopher of everyday life. His writings spanned history, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and urban studies. Best known for The Practice of Everyday Life, he examined how ordinary people resist power structures through tactics of daily use. De Certeau combined erudition with attention to lived experience, making him influential in cultural studies, anthropology, and design theory. His work continues to inspire urban and spatial research.

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher and historian whose analyses of power, knowledge, and discourse transformed the humanities and social sciences. His work revealed how institutions—prisons, hospitals, schools—produce regimes of truth and modes of subjectivity. Concepts such as biopolitics, heterotopia, and governmentality continue to reverberate across urbanism, design, and landscape theory. Foucault’s genealogical method destabilized taken-for-granted categories, showing how space itself becomes a medium of control, resistance, and emancipation.

Michelle Provoost

Michelle Provoost is a Dutch architectural historian specializing in urban planning history, postwar architecture, and New Town development. She co-founded Crimson Architectural Historians in 1994, leading numerous research and design projects. Since 2008 she has been Director of the International New Town Institute in Almere, making it a global center for New Town research. Provoost lectures widely and contributes to education, publications, and advisory boards internationally. She is a key voice in understanding the history and future of planned cities.

Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) was a German-American architect and a pioneer of modern architecture. The last director of the Bauhaus, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1937 and led the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Known for minimalist steel-and-glass buildings, he is associated with the aphorisms “less is more” and “God is in the details.”

Mladen Dolar

Mladen Dolar (b. 1951) is a Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist. He co-founded the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis with Slavoj Žižek and Rastko Močnik, blending Lacanian psychoanalysis with German idealism. Dolar is best known for his book A Voice and Nothing More, exploring the metaphysics and politics of the voice. He has written extensively on Hegel, French structuralism, and film theory. His work has influenced philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique.

Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich

Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich is a licensed architect, urban designer and landscape designer, trained in Switzerland and Spain. Until 2023, she taught in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD, where she was the 2017–2018 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow. She also taught landscape architecture at the University of Virginia and the Urban Design Department at ETSAB-UPC Barcelona. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design at Washington University in St. Louis.

Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) was an American social theorist and pioneer of environmental thought. He developed the theory of social ecology, linking ecological sustainability with anarchist and libertarian socialist traditions. Bookchin authored The Ecology of Freedom and Urbanization Without Cities, influential works in green political thought. Later, he formulated “communalism” as an alternative to both capitalism and anarchism. His ideas inspired movements from the 1960s New Left to contemporary democratic confederalism in Northern Syria.

Neil Brenner

Neil Brenner (b. 1969) is an American urban theorist whose work on planetary urbanization redefines how cities and hinterlands are understood as interdependent. He argues that urbanization now extends across extraction zones, logistics corridors, and infrastructural networks, challenging bounded notions of the city. His books and edited volumes situate urban theory within critical geography and political economy, shaping discourses on space, governance, and design.

Nicolas Bourriaud

Nicolas Bourriaud (b. 1965) is a French curator and art critic known for theorizing relational aesthetics. He co-founded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and has curated numerous international exhibitions and biennials. Bourriaud has held positions at Tate Britain and the École des Beaux-Arts, and curated the Altermodern Tate Triennial in 2009. His writings explore how contemporary art creates social relations and forms of encounter. He remains an influential figure in global curatorial practice.

Nicole Meier

Landscape architect with more than 15 years of work experience in Europe and North America. Driven by the pursuit to contribute to a sustainable urban development and building inclusive environments for tomorrow’s society which is facing various global challenges. Passionate about landscape and its perception, expressed through photography. Mountaineering. Rock climbing. Long-distance running. Various cultural interests.

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) is an Icelandic–Danish artist known for large-scale installations that use light, water, mist, and temperature to make perception itself the medium. Through Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin, since 1995) and Studio Other Spaces (with Sebastian Behmann), he bridges art, architecture, and environmental research. Landmark works include The Weather Project (Tate Modern, 2003), Green river interventions (1998–2001), the Serpentine Pavilion (2007, with Kjetil Trædal Thorsen), and The New York City Waterfalls (2008). His practice often functions as public pedagogy, staging climate, atmosphere, and collective experience in space. For landscape and urban design, Eliasson’s work is a toolkit for framing phenomena, choreographing publics, and making ecology sensorially legible.

Paul Bourel

Paul is a landscape architect, urban designer and one of the founding Directors of studio gb. Paul studied urban design at Westminster University after a degree in landscape architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. He has worked across the Netherlands, Slovenia and the UK within architecture practices, on a wide range of high-profile projects, including Exchange Square (London, UK) while working at DSDHA and the Curkrarna Contemporary Arts Museum (Ljubljana, Slovenia) while working at Scapelab.

Paul’s work is centred on the belief that landscape makes an essential contribution to sociable and sustainable communities. His experience covers all aspects of the design process, from sketch design to construction, with a particular interest in detail and craftsmanship.

Paul is passionate about research and education with previous teaching experience at the London School of Architecture and the Versailles School of Landscape Architecture.

Paul Ricœur

Paul Ricœur (1913–2005, France) – Philosopher of hermeneutic phenomenology, Ricœur combined existential analysis with the interpretation of texts, myth, memory, and narrative. His work expanded hermeneutics into theology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory, earning him the Kyoto Prize in 2000. A major figure of 20th-century thought, Ricœur stands alongside Heidegger and Gadamer in shaping the philosophy of interpretation.

Paul Robbins

Paul Robbins is dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he advances interdisciplinary responses to rapid environmental change. A researcher and educator in political ecology, he studies how everyday practices and resource governance shape environments and power. He has strengthened community partnerships across agencies and with sovereign Native nations, expanding service-learning and applied research. Robbins is known for accessible scholarship that links policy, livelihoods, and ecological outcomes. His leadership models how universities can connect environmental theory to practice at regional and global scales.

Peter Del Tredici

Peter Del Tredici is a renowned botanist and horticulturist who worked at Harvard University, contributing extensively to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston and Harvard Forest. He is celebrated for his particular knowledge he developed of wild urban plants that thrive in the patchy, vacant spaces of East Coast cities—from Montreal to Detroit—and for highlighting their ability to coinhabit “novel ecosystems” shaped by human activity.

Peter Kurz

Peter Kurz is a landscape architect and vegetation scientist who currently focuses on environmental education. He works as a professor at the University of Education Upper Austria.

Peter Zumthor

Peter Zumthor (b. 1943) is a Swiss architect known for an uncompromisingly minimalist and phenomenological practice. His work foregrounds atmosphere, tactility, and memory, emphasizing how material and form shape embodied perception. Though his oeuvre is relatively small, projects like the Therme Vals have become canonical examples of architecture as an experiential, almost meditative, encounter with place.

Philippe Descola

Philippe Descola (b. 1949) is a French anthropologist whose work has profoundly reshaped understandings of the nature–culture divide. In Beyond Nature and Culture (2005/2013 in English), Descola proposed four “ontologies” through which societies conceptualize relations between humans and non-humans: animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. Unlike the Western tradition of naturalism, which separates human subjectivity from an inert natural world, other ontologies recognize varying degrees of continuity or correspondence between beings. Descola’s comparative framework challenges the universality of the nature–culture dualism, positioning it as a cultural construction rather than an ontological truth. His notion of relative universalism seeks to account for both shared and divergent ways of world-making across societies. For landscape architecture, Descola’s work invites rethinking design through plural ontologies that foreground entanglement and interdependency.

Pierre Bélanger

Pierre Bélanger is a designer, educator, and curator whose work dismantles the entanglements of infrastructure, ecology, and empire. Founder of the Landscape Infrastructure Lab and OPSYS Media, he situates design within the geopolitics of extraction and militarized systems. His books—Landscape as Infrastructure, Ecologies of Power, Risk Ecologies—and his curation of the controversial “EXTRACTION” pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale confront the hidden ecologies of dispossession. A recipient of the Canada Prix de Rome, Bélanger threads research, activism, and design into a critical cartography of landscapes shaped by power, territory, and resource.

Plato

Plato (c. 428–348 BC, Greece) – Foundational Greek philosopher of the Classical era, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle. He founded the Academy in Athens and shaped Western thought through his dialogues, advancing the method of dialectic. Best known for the theory of forms, addressing universals and the nature of reality, his work influenced metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.

Quentin Meillassoux

Quentin Meillassoux (b. 1967) is a French philosopher associated with speculative realism. In After Finitude (2006), he develops “speculative materialism,” rejecting correlationism—the idea that we can only ever know the relation between thought and world. Meillassoux calls for philosophy to engage with the absolute and the contingent, resonating with design and ecology discourses that grapple with deep time, material indifference, and worlds beyond human perception.

R. Allen Gardner

Allen Gardner (1930–2021) was an American psychologist whose pioneering research with his wife Beatrix “Trixie” Gardner transformed the study of animal cognition. Together, they raised and taught Washoe, the first chimpanzee to learn American Sign Language, in their home laboratory in Reno, Nevada. Their cross-fostering project, later extended to other chimpanzees, provided groundbreaking insights into communication and language acquisition. The Gardners’ work sparked worldwide attention and became a foundational reference in linguistics and cognitive science. Gardner taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, where his research gave the institution national prominence.

Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson (1907–1964), marine biologist and writer, reshaped humanity’s relation to the ocean and the biosphere. Her sea trilogy (1941–1955) mapped the invisible rhythms of marine life, while Silent Spring (1962) exposed the toxicity of pesticides with a clarity that unsettled governments and industries. Against fierce corporate resistance, her words seeded the U.S. environmental movement, leading to bans on DDT and the founding of the EPA. Carson’s legacy is one of lyrical science—where observation turned into resistance, and resistance into law.

Rainer Knapas

Rainer Knapas (b. 1946) is a Finnish philosopher, art and cultural historian, editor, and researcher. He has worked at the Finnish National Board of Antiquities, the University of Helsinki, and the Swedish Literary Society. His wide-ranging essays and columns address cultural and literary history, architecture, and heritage. He is an honorary doctor of the University of Helsinki, recognized for his contributions to Finnish cultural scholarship. Knapas remains a significant voice in debates on art and cultural history in Finland.

Ray Oldenburg

Ray Oldenburg (1932–2022) was an American urban sociologist best known for the concept of the “third place”—informal gathering spaces such as cafés, bars, and bookstores that foster civic life and social cohesion. His The Great Good Place (1989) argues that such environments are essential for democracy, community resilience, and urban vitality. The notion continues to inform urban and landscape design approaches to public space.

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams (1921–1988) was a Welsh writer, critic, and socialist thinker whose work on politics, culture, media, and literature helped shape cultural materialism and the field of cultural studies. His books sold widely and remain influential within the New Left and beyond.

Razvan Sandru

Adrian Razvan Sandru is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in an interdisciplinary research project on relational and situational ontology. He holds a PhD from the University of Tübingen on the topic of subject activity and passivity in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion.

Rene Descartes

René Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, often called the founder of modern philosophy. He is best known for the dictum cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), which encapsulates his method of radical doubt. His work in analytic geometry laid the foundation for the Cartesian coordinate system and bridged algebra and geometry. Descartes’ philosophy of dualism profoundly influenced metaphysics, epistemology, and theology. His writings, though once banned by the Catholic Church, continue to shape modern thought.

Reza Negarestani

Reza Negarestani (b. 1977) is an Iranian philosopher and writer, best known for his “theory-fiction” book Cyclonopedia (2008), which became a cult reference in contemporary theory. His work moves between speculative realism, rationalist inhumanism, and the philosophy of intelligence, engaging with transcendental philosophy, German idealism, and Carnapian conceptual engineering. Negarestani collaborates widely with artists, including librettos for Florian Hecker, and contributes regularly to critical theory journals. Currently, he directs the philosophy program at The New Centre for Research & Practice.

Rhys Williams

Rhys is program director for landscape architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Through the development of critical approaches to photographing landscape architecture, he investigates the actuality of built projects, with an emphasis accounting for the medium’s propensity for change. A growing body of work forms an evidential basis for the generation of new theories and histories on the topic. These aim to elevate and extend landscape architecture/photography, affording newfound attention to a practice that has long escaped adequate critical attention, despite its ubiquity. Rhys invites collaborations with practitioners, practices and fellow researchers who share an interest in exploring the potential of landscape architecture/photography.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist, science communicator, and author. His book The Selfish Gene (1976) popularized the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the concept of the “meme.” A fierce critic of creationism and intelligent design, he has championed atheism in works such as The God Delusion (2006). Dawkins served as Oxford’s Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. His work has made him one of the most influential public intellectuals in evolutionary science.

Richard Long

Richard Long (b. 1945) is an English sculptor and land artist whose work expands the boundaries of sculpture into performance and conceptual art. Since the 1960s, he has created works based on walking, documenting interventions in landscapes through photographs, texts, and maps. His materials often include stone, earth, and mud, used to inscribe simple lines and circles in natural settings. Long is the only artist nominated four times for the Turner Prize, winning in 1989. His practice explores the meeting point of human abstraction and natural patterns.

Richard Pell

Richard Pell is the founder and director of the Center for PostNatural History, co-founder of the Institute for Applied Autonomy and Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Pell’s work has been exhibited in museums including the V&A, Wellcome Collection, Museum für Naturkunde, Mass MoCA, CCCB, ZKM, 2008 Taipei Biennial, Gregg Museum, NHM, and Carnegie MNH. He received fellowships from Rockefeller New Media, Creative Capital, Smithsonian Artist Research, and generous support from Waag Society and the Kindle Project. Pell is a National Academy of Science KAVLI Fellow and 2016 Pittsburgh Artist of the Year.

Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett (b. 1943) is an American sociologist whose work explores cities, labor, and culture. His influential books, including The Fall of Public Man, Flesh and Stone, and The Craftsman, trace how urban form and work shape human relationships. Sennett has taught at the London School of Economics and New York University, and founded the New York Institute for the Humanities. His research has also guided public policy, including UN commissions on urban development. A central figure in urban theory, he links the ethics of cooperation with the design of cities.

Richard Stiles

Richard Stiles is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria. Trained in biology and landscape design at Oxford and Newcastle, he previously taught at the University of Manchester before moving to Vienna. His work focuses on strategic landscape planning and urban design, and he has been a leading voice in shaping landscape architecture education in Europe, serving as President of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools and for over a decade as Coordinator of the EU-funded LE:NOTRE Thematic Network.

Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott (b. 1937) is an English filmmaker celebrated for his atmospheric visual style across science fiction, crime, and epic cinema. His landmark films include Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Gladiator (2000), and The Martian (2015). Scott’s cityscapes—whether futuristic Los Angeles or ancient Rome—have shaped how popular culture imagines urban and historical environments. Knighted in 2003, his career spans over four decades, with films grossing more than $5 billion worldwide. His works Alien, Blade Runner, and Thelma & Louise are preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry.

Robert Schäfer

Robert Schäfer, founder of Topos Magazine studied Landscape Architecture and Journalism, founded Topos in 1992 and was in charge of Garten+Landschaft since 1984. He currently deals with landscape issues and is supporting Landezine.

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) was an American artist and writer, best known as a pioneer of land art. His iconic Spiral Jetty (1970) remains a touchstone in the dialogue between art, geology, and entropy. Smithson developed the concepts of “site” and “non-site,” exploring how art and landscape intersect through displacement and mapping. His essays, including Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape, bridged earthworks with landscape architecture discourse. Smithson’s short but prolific career continues to shape environmental art and critical landscape thought.

Roberto Burle Marx

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) was a Brazilian landscape architect, artist, and ecologist who introduced modernist landscape architecture to Brazil. Celebrated for his tropical gardens and urban parks, he also designed stage sets, textiles, and jewelry. A pioneer of rainforest conservation, he discovered and cultivated many plant species, some of which bear his name.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer (b. 1953) is a Potawatomi botanist, writer, and educator who bridges Indigenous knowledge with Western science. A professor at SUNY-ESF, she directs the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her books Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass combine ecology, storytelling, and ethics of reciprocity, earning wide acclaim beyond academia. Through her writing and teaching, she advocates for kinship between humans and the living world. Kimmerer’s work has become foundational in contemporary ecological and decolonial thought.

Robin Winogrond

Robin Winogrond is a landscape architect and urban designer in Zurich, Switzerland. She practices internationally on projects, juries, lecturing, teaching and publishing. From 2019-2021 she taught design studios as a Visiting Design Critic at Harvard GSD. Her interdisciplinary background, reflected in an array of prize-winning projects, ranges from built urban spaces, installations and gardens to concepts for large and small-scale open spaces. She was a Resident Artist at Stuttgart Academy of Art and holds a Master’s in Landscape Architecture and Bachelor’s in Urban Design.

Rod Barnett

Rod Barnett is a New Zealand landscape architect and theorist whose work links complex adaptive systems with design practice. Drawing on nonlinear dynamics, morphogenesis, and far-from-equilibrium processes, he frames landscapes as emergent, open-ended systems. His research engages co-design, more-than-human ecologies, and cultural histories, advancing a model of landscape architecture as collaborative negotiation with complex social and biophysical dynamics.

Rod Neumann

Rod Neumann is a geographer whose research examines the co-constitution of nature, society, and landscape within the political economy of the environment. His work has focused on national parks and Indigenous peoples in California and Africa.

Roderick Wyllie

Roderick Wyllie, FASLA, is an award-winning landscape architect and a founding partner of Surfacedesign, Inc. Roderick has led a variety of complex projects within the office, including the Uber Campus in Mission Bay, San Francisco’s Bayfront Park, The Land’s End Visitor Center, The Barnacles at Pier 9 and Expedia Global Headquarters in Seattle. His horticultural knowledge and passion for material authenticity reinforce craftsmanship and attention to detail into each project at Surfacedesign.

Roger Fouts

Roger S. Fouts (b. 1943) is an American primate researcher and co-founder of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI) at Central Washington University. He is best known for teaching the chimpanzee Washoe to use American Sign Language, a groundbreaking project that transformed debates on animal cognition and communication. Alongside his wife Deborah Fouts, he expanded this research with other chimpanzees and became a leading advocate for great ape rights. His writings and activism link animal welfare with ethics and law.

Rosa Kliass

Rosa Grena Kliass (b. 1932) is a Brazilian landscape architect and one of the country’s most influential designers of the modern and contemporary era. Her work includes São Paulo’s Anhangabaú Valley renovation, Parque da Juventude, and the city’s landscape master plan. Kliass founded the Brazilian Association of Landscape Architects in 1976, advocating for the profession nationally. Trained at the University of São Paulo, she worked closely with Roberto Burle Marx’s generation but developed her own civic-oriented approach.

Rosetta S. Elkin

Rosetta S. Elkin is a landscape architect, researcher, and educator whose work explores the entangled politics of plant life. Her publications—Tiny Taxonomy (2017), Plant Life (2022), Landscapes of Retreat (2023)—foreground plants not as background matter but as active agents within design, ecology, and politics. As founder of Practice Landscape and director of the Pratt Institute program, Elkin positions landscape architecture at the intersection of creative research, horticultural practice, and critical humanities.

Sara Eichner

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 a co-founder of Studio 2263; a design, data and mapping studio, and works with research accelerators at Pratt Institute as visiting faculty. She is also part of the volunteer collective that organizes Data through Design (DxD), an annual art exhibition (you are invited to participate in) that encourages using public data from the NYC open data portal.

Sarah Cowles

Sarah Cowles is the Director of Ruderal, based in Tbilisi. Ruderal is a landscape architecture and planning studio focused on the emerging development markets in the Caucasus region.

For Cowles, every site project is a forum to negotiate and invent new relationships of culture and ecology. She leads multidisciplinary teams to realize complex landscape-focused projects in international contexts. Her expertise in landscape planning and design spans a range of scales, including master planning for cultural institutions, ecological rehabilitation of industrial, natural disaster, and mining sites, and urban and residential landscape design. Her prior experience includes practice with TLS Landscape Architecture, where she coordinated site design of the US Consulate in Guangzhou, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Treasure Island and Hunters Point Shipyard. As a professor of Landscape Architecture in professional programs in the United States, she has held positions at The Ohio State University, Washington University, and most recently, The University of Southern California. She is a Fulbright Scholar and recently completed a Fulbright Specialist Grant in Tbilisi. Cowles received her Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s GSD and her BFA from the California College of the Arts.

Scott Ruff

Scott Ruff (USA), is an architect and educator, principal of RuffWorks Studio and Visiting Associate Professor of Architecture at Pratt Institute and NYIT. Trained at Cornell, he has also taught at Yale, Tulane, Syracuse, Hampton, Buffalo, and Cornell. His practice and teaching engage questions of cultural identity, community, and design, with a particular emphasis on African American contributions to architecture.

Sebastian Guha Skjulhaug

Sebastian Guha Skjulhaug is a landscape architect, writer and artist concerned with sustainable change and spatial justice issues in urban landscapes. He holds a MSc in Landscape Architecture for Global Sustainability from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and a BA in Human Geography from University of Oslo. His master thesis, Equitable Edges: The Possibilities for Designing Just Urban Waterfronts, studies how justice concerns are implemented in contemporary urban waterfront projects and their capacity to provide equitable access to the urban landscape. This essay is based on the thesis, which can be read in full here: https://nmbu.brage.unit.no/nmbu-xmlui/handle/11250/3163057

Sébastien Penfornis

Sébastien Penfornis is an architect and urban designer in charge of taktyk Paris office. He also teaches at the ENSAB, Rennes. His practice based research explored the notion of play and serendipity through the landscape design processes and transformations.

Sébastien PENFORNIS est architecte et urbaniste en charge du bureau taktyk Paris. Il enseigne également à l’ENSAB de Rennes. Ses recherches basées sur la pratique ont exploré la notion de jeu et de sérendipité à travers les processus et les transformations de la conception du paysage.

Seth Denizen

Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in human geography, evolutionary biology, and landscape architecture. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley and has taught at the University of Hong Kong, Harvard University and Princeton University, where he was a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. He is a recipient of the 2019 SOM Foundation Research Prize. Currently, he is an assistant professor of landscape architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design at Washington University in St. Louis.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. He developed theories of the unconscious, repression, transference, and the psychic structures of id, ego, and superego. Freud’s work on sexuality, dreams, and neurosis reshaped psychology and influenced art, literature, and philosophy throughout the 20th century. His later writings critiqued religion and culture, introducing concepts like the death drive. Although contested, his thought remains foundational across the humanities.

Signe Nielsen

Signe is a Founding Principal of MNLA and has been practicing as a landscape architect and urban designer in New York since 1978. Her body of work has renewed the environmental integrity and transformed the quality of spaces for those who live, work, and play in the urban realm. A Fellow of the ASLA, she is the recipient of more than 100 national and local design awards for public open space projects and is published extensively nationally and internationally. Signe is a professor of urban design and landscape architecture at Pratt Institute in both the graduate and undergraduate Schools of Architecture and is the former President of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Born in Paris, Signe received a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in Urban Planning from Smith College; a Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Architecture from City College of New York; and a Bachelor of Science in Construction Management from Pratt Institute.

Simonetta Zanon

Head of landscape research and projects at Fondazione Benetton, Treviso, Italy

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic associated with the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. He works at the intersection of Hegelian philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist theory, while engaging with film, ideology critique, and theology. Since The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), he has published more than fifty books, often mixing high theory with jokes, cinema, and pop culture. Žižek is known as much for his provocative style as for his philosophical depth, making him one of today’s most visible public intellectuals.

Stephan Brenneisen

Stephan Brenneisen is a Swiss ecologist and researcher at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). He is recognized for contributing to the research on urban biodiversity and green roofs, particularly their role in habitat creation.

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. At Harvard University, he co-developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposing that evolution proceeds through long stasis interrupted by bursts of change. Gould was also a gifted writer, producing hundreds of essays and books that brought evolutionary theory to a broad audience. He opposed strict selectionism, evolutionary psychology, and creationism, instead framing science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.” Named a U.S. “Living Legend” in 2000, his influence extended far beyond biology.

Stephen Pyne

Stephen J. Pyne (b. 1949) is an American environmental historian best known for his extensive scholarship on the history of fire. A former wildland firefighter at the Grand Canyon, he wrote Fire in America (1982) and later the multi-volume series To the Last Smoke, chronicling fire histories across regions. He argues that humanity’s combustion practices define a “Pyrocene epoch,” paralleling the Ice Ages. Pyne has also written widely on exploration and environmental thought, making him a key figure in linking ecology, culture, and history.

Stuart Elden

A political theorist and geographer, Elden (United Kingdom, b. 1971) has consistently redefined how space and power are thought together. Trained in politics and history, he has written extensively on the conceptual histories of territory, the state, and the spatial dimensions of political thought. His works probe the genealogies of concepts that shape governance and geopolitics, demonstrating that space is never neutral but always historically and ideologically constituted. Elected Fellow of the British Academy, his scholarship bridges political theory, geography, and history with rare rigor.

Susana Rojas Saviñón

Susana Rojas Saviñón is an architect who graduated from the Universidad Iberoamericana and holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Architecture and Urban Design from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She also studied a specialization in wood design and construction at Aalto University in Finland. In 2020, she received the Young Creators scholarship from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts, and from 2019 to 2024, she was a professor of architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

Sven-Ingvar Andersson

Sven-Ingvar Andersson (1927–2007, Sweden) – Landscape architect and professor at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, Andersson was celebrated for urban spaces such as Karlsplatz in Vienna, Trinitatis Kirkeplads in Copenhagen, and Museumsplein in Amsterdam. His collaborations with Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, including Parc de la Villette and the Grande Arche in Paris, brought him international recognition. A prolific writer and teacher, he bridged garden art and urban design, shaping the profession across Europe.

Tamer-Georges Musharbesh

Tamer-Georges Musharbesh is a Senior Landscape Architect and Architect with over 16 years of international experience across the U.S., Middle East, and Africa. He began his architectural journey working on iconic public buildings, but after a few years, he realized that landscape is not just a backdrop or extension of architecture; it is much deeper. This insight led him to study landscape and environmental planning, where he came to believe that landscape has the power to shape architecture, not the other way around.

His growing interest in the emotional and psychological impact of space drew him to explore how landscapes can support mental health. His recent thesis focused on healing environments for individuals living with PTSD, depression, and schizophrenia, grounded in his experience living and working in Beirut, and centered on the Hôpital Psychiatrique de la Croix in Bqennaya, Lebanon.

Tamer’s work today centers on therapeutic landscapes, ecological restoration, and community-driven design that restores dignity and well-being.

Tariq Jazeel

Tariq Jazeel is Professor of Human Geography at UCL. His research spans cultural geography, postcolonial theory, and South Asian studies. He co-directs UCL’s Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World and has held fellowships in Sri Lanka, Singapore, and India. He has edited major journals including Antipode and Society and Space.

Ted Steinberg

Ted Steinberg (b. 1961) is an American environmental historian and professor at Case Western Reserve University. His research explores how capitalism, law, and social inequality shape human relationships with nature. Books such as Down to Earth, Acts of God, and American Green examine topics from disasters to suburban lawns. Steinberg is also active in political debates, linking history with contemporary issues of justice and environment.

Theo Deutinger

Theo Deutinger (b. 1971) is an Austrian architect, illustrator, and writer, based in the Netherlands. Founder of TD Architects and co-initiator of the Minus20degree art and architecture biennale, he is known for using graphics and speculative proposals to critique contemporary geopolitics and urbanism. His book Handbook of Tyranny (2018) documents the architectures of control—from refugee camps to prisons and border infrastructures—revealing their political and ethical dimensions.

Thierry Kandjee

His practice combines critical gardening & design, editorial projects (Landscape Architecture Europe 2012), and studio teaching (ENSP Versailles, Rmit Melbourne, ULB Brussels, NUS Singapore). Since 2025, he has been developing Taktyk Tropics, a critical practice that strives for a decolonial approach to landscape. Dr.Thierry KANDJEE est paysagiste concepteur, co fondateur de la plateforme taktyk. Sa pratique entremêle jardinage critique, projet de maitrise d’œuvre, projet éditorial (landscape architecture Europe 2012) et enseignement du projet de paysage (ENSP Versailles, Rmit Melbourne, ULB Bruxelles, NUS Singapour). Il développe depuis 2025 Taktyk tropics, pratique critique qui tend vers une approche décoloniale du paysage

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and theologian, regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the medieval period. He sought to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Christian doctrine, establishing Thomism as a foundational school of thought. His major works, including the Summa Theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles, shaped natural theology and scholasticism. Canonized as a saint and later named Doctor of the Church, Aquinas became known as the Doctor Angelicus. His synthesis of reason and faith continues to influence theology, philosophy, and ethics.

Thomas Church

Thomas Church (1902–1978) was a pioneering American landscape architect and a leader of the “California Style” of Modernist garden design. Educated at UC Berkeley and Harvard, he combined Mediterranean influences with modernist principles to adapt gardens to California’s climate and lifestyle. His practice in San Francisco, active from 1933 to 1977, produced iconic residential gardens and larger planning projects. Church emphasized outdoor living and fluid connections between house and garden. His book Gardens Are for People remains a classic in landscape design.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English biologist and comparative anatomist, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his vigorous defense of evolutionary theory. He played a prominent role in the famous 1860 Oxford debate on evolution and coined the term “agnosticism” in 1869. Largely self-taught, Huxley became one of the leading comparative anatomists of the 19th century, clarifying evolutionary relationships among invertebrates and vertebrates. His study of Archaeopteryx led him to propose that birds evolved from small dinosaurs, a view since confirmed by science. He was also instrumental in advancing scientific education in Britain.

Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel (b. 1937) is an American philosopher whose work spans political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of mind. He is best known for his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974), a landmark critique of reductionist accounts of consciousness. Nagel has also written extensively on moral theory, altruism, and liberal political philosophy. His later work Mind and Cosmos (2012) questioned materialist accounts of life and consciousness, sparking significant debate. A long-time professor at New York University, Nagel trained under John Rawls and taught at Berkeley, Princeton, and NYU.

Thorbjörn Andersson

Thorbjörn Andersson is a renowned Swedish landscape architect. Besides designing, he also writes about landscape and our profession and teaches at SLU at Ultuna, Sweden. His CV is full of achievements, one of the more recent is for example prince Eugene medal, he received from the king of Sweden. He has thought as a visiting professor at Harvard GSD among other universities.

Tim Ingold

Timothy Ingold (United Kingdom, b. 1948) is Anthropologist whose work reorients the discipline toward processes of dwelling, making, and human–environment relations. His long engagement with Sámi communities and northern landscapes generated a vision of anthropology not as the study of static cultures but as an inquiry into the ongoing processes of dwelling, making, and correspondence with environments. Rejecting rigid dichotomies, Ingold emphasizes lines, movements, and relations as the grammar of existence. His writings have become touchstones for fields from design to ecology, shaping how we conceive the entanglement of humans, nonhumans, and worlds in formation.

Tim Nottage

Tim “Teal” Nottage (they/he) is a designer, researcher, and maker with a background in urban planning, environmental justice, and the arts. Their work spans a range of disciplines including immersive installation, sustainable design and construction, composting and urban soil rehabilitation in community gardens, and land-based research and advocacy. They are currently based in Brooklyn, NY (Lenapehoking) and are pursuing a Masters in Landscape Architecture from Pratt Institute.

Tim Waterman

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 a former Vice-President of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS). He is the author of Fundamentals of Landscape Architecture, now in its second edition and translated into several languages, and, with Ed Wall, Urban Design, also translated into several languages. He has recently edited three collections: Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall, the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert, and Landscape Citizenships with Jane Wolff and Ed Wall. His most recent book is The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design (2022). His writing has appeared in a variety of journals, including the Journal of Architecture and Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM).

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton (b. 1968) is a British literary theorist and Professor at Rice University. Although they often appear somewhat uncomfortable with being called a philosopher, they are nevertheless a key figure in object-oriented ontology and ecological theory. They introduced the concept of “hyperobjects” — phenomena like climate change that are massively distributed in time and space. Morton’s works, including Ecology without Nature and Humankind, challenge human-centered thinking and argue for solidarity with nonhuman beings. Their writings draw on Romanticism, Shelley, food studies, Buddhism, religion, and critical theory, merging ecology with cultural philosophy. Morton also teaches in the Synthetic Landscapes program at SCI-Arc.

Todd McGowan

McGowan teaches film and theory at the University of Vermont, staging encounters between Hegel, Freud, Marx, and the moving image. His wager is that theory is not ornament to art but its accomplice: a force that unsettles the given, that refracts comedy, capitalism, or cinema through contradiction and desire. In books such as The Impossible David Lynch, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, and Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy, he shows how laughter, fantasy, and psychic cost disclose the fractures of social life. His psychoanalytic film theory reimagines spectatorship, not as identification but as an experience structured by desire’s restless circuit.

Tom Fort

Tom Simons

Udo Weilacher

Professor Udo Weilacher studied landscape architecture at TUM and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona/Los Angeles, later teaching at the University of Karlsruhe and ETH Zurich, where he earned his doctorate with distinction in 2001. Weilacher was appointed Professor at the University of Hanover in 2002, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape (2006–2008), before becoming Full Professor at TUM in 2009. He is the author of numerous international publications and a member of the Werkbund, the Bavarian Chamber of Architects, the German Society for Garden Art and Landscape Culture, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Center for Garden Art and Landscape Architecture in Hanover. He researches international landscape architecture with a focus on transforming industrially shaped landscapes and urban spaces into habitats for people and nature. His work also examines contemporary landscape art, 20th-century landscape architecture, and innovative methods of analysis and design.

Urška Škerl

Urška Škerl is educated as a landscape architect and is editor at Landezine.

Usue Ruiz Arana

Usue is a chartered landscape architect, researcher and educator. Her research and scholarship are concerned with advancing Landscape Architecture as a discipline uniquely positioned to address planetary health, biodiversity and climate crises, and social and eco-justice. To that end, she researches in the cross-cutting fields of acoustic ecology, multispecies collaborations and ‘research by design’. Her keen interest in design and art as forms of research informs her role as “Thinking Eye” editor of the peer review Journal of Landscape Architecture – JoLA

Viktor Shklovsky

Writer, critic, pamphleteer, and one of the founding figures of Russian Formalism, Shklovsky (1893–1984) was among the most incisive theorists of twentieth-century literature and culture. His Theory of Prose (1925) crystallized the principle of ostranenie—estrangement or defamiliarization—as the device through which art resists the automatism of perception, returning the world to visibility. Across novels, essays, and polemics, he navigated revolution, exile, and censorship, while never abandoning the conviction that form is not secondary to content but the very engine of experience. Irreverent, restless, and fiercely alive to the politics of representation, Shklovsky remains indispensable for understanding how art interrupts habit and compels us to see anew.

Virginia Scott Jenkins

Virginia Scott Jenkins (b. 1948) is an American historian and writer whose work examines horticulture, culture, and environmental history. She is best known for her book The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (1994), which traces the cultural, political, and ecological roots of lawn culture in the United States. Her later book Bananas: An American History (2000) explored global trade, advertising, and the fruit’s social meanings. Jenkins has taught at several U.S. universities and served as scholar-in-residence at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Her work combines environmental critique with cultural analysis.

Vladimir Guculak

Vladimir was born in Latvia and graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a master’s degree in landscape architecture. He gained professional experience in the Netherlands and Switzerland before returning to the UK. Prior to setting up Studio gb, as a Director at BHSLA, Vladimir oversaw and delivered high-profile projects in the UK including RHS Garden Wisley, Belgrove House, 50 Fenchurch Street, Salisbury Square and a new piece of public realm neighbouring Hanover Square in Mayfair, London. His expertise is in urban regeneration schemes and mixed-use developments, while further developing a particular interest in combining art and sciences with planting and horticulture.

Vladimir published the Landscape Observer, a compendium of landscape architecture projects in London spanning a research period of a decade. He currently teaches as a practice tutor at the Bartlett, UCL and is regularly invited to give lectures and crits across several UK universities.

Vladimir’s artworks have been exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition, National Original Print Exhibition as well as at a solo show at Potager du Roi in Versailles Gardens.

W. J. T. Mitchell

Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, and long-time editor of Critical Inquiry, Mitchell (United States, b. 1942) has been one of the most influential figures in visual culture and media theory. His books, from Iconology to Picture Theory to What Do Pictures Want?, argue that images are not inert representations but active agents, with desires, demands, and social lives. Drawing on Marx, Freud, and semiotics, Mitchell insists that pictures must be thought as living entities within economies of power and meaning. His interventions have decisively shaped debates on visuality, aesthetics, and the politics of representation in an age saturated with images.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist whose work bridged German idealism, Jewish mysticism, and Marxism. Closely associated with the Frankfurt School, he engaged with figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Gershom Scholem, and Hannah Arendt. Benjamin is best known for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) and Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), alongside influential essays on Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust, and translation. His writings on history, aesthetics, and media theory continue to shape philosophy and cultural criticism. In 1940, fleeing the Nazi advance, he took his own life at the French–Spanish border.

William Furness

Yaniv Korman

Yaniv Korman is a Heritage Landscape Manager at Tom Stuart-Smith Studio and the lead landscape architect on The Casa della Regina Carolina team at Pompeii.

Yves Brunier

Yves Brunier (1962–1991, France) – Trained as both architect and landscape architect, Brunier worked with Rem Koolhaas at OMA and later with Jean Nouvel, producing projects such as Rotterdam’s Museumpark. Known for his raw collages and confrontational aesthetics, he rejected harmonious depictions of nature, instead staging violent, hybrid encounters between culture and landscape. His short but intense career—cut short by AIDS at 28—left a lasting mark on landscape architecture’s critical imagination.

Zarja Muršič

Dr. Zarja Muršič is a biologist, cognitive scientist, and evolutionary anthropologist. She is a freelance science communicator and journalist, with contributions featured on local media outlets Radio Študent, Radio Val 202, Metina lista, and others. She is currently leading a citizen science project, A Collaborative Journey From Fiction to Facts, together with the institute Strašno hudi. She is also actively involved in the Slovenian citizen science network and is currently the ambassador of citizen science in Slovenia as part of ECSA.

Zaš Brezar

Zaš Brezar (b. 1984, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Slovenia) is founder and editor-in-chief of Landezine. Educated as a landscape architect (University of Ljubljana), he spent several years in practice, later establishing Landezine in 2009. He is focused on the production of space, specifically mapping, tracing and interpreting the course of landscape architecture and questioning its role in society and politics of public space.

Zihao Zhang

Zihao Zhang is a designer, educator, and scholar in landscape architecture. As a landscape theorist, he provides critical analyses of the entanglement between nature and technology, the human and nonhuman realms, as well as ecosystems and intelligent machines. Through building transdisciplinary investigation across design, engineering, and environmental humanities, his book Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment interrogates the ramifications of cybernetics on contemporary culture and the constructed environment. Zihao serves as an assistant professor and director of the landscape architecture program at the City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture.

Zoë Tank

Zoë Tank (she/her) is a designer, writer and recent architecture graduate from Pratt Institute whose work engages in philosophy, land-based practices, and alternative spatial thinking. Interested in the intermeshed existences of bodies, buildings, and ecologies, she regards design as a powerful mediator between place, temporalities and more-than-human experiences. She is currently based in Brooklyn, NY (Lenapehoking).