Perception is the process of sensing and interpreting the world through the body—sight, sound, touch, smell, memory, all entangled. It is not passive reception but active construction. Philosophers like Merleau-Ponty stressed that perception is embodied, always from a position, never from nowhere. What we perceive is shaped by culture, habit, and power as much as by the senses. Perception is therefore unstable, contested, political and can not reveal an object in their entirety, no matter the method of observation.
An essay on how we push animals into playing roles — from fables and films to renders of biodiversity and art — tracing how these projections tame, abstract, or estrange, and how synurbists and artists unsettle the human–animal divide.
Scientific research into animal behaviour still rests on many deeply ingrained assumptions about what is deemed to be “natural” human behaviour. For example, men—males—are assumed by nature to be more dominant and aggressive than women—females. And if men are violent, then the violent behaviour of other male animals in the wild can supposedly be explained […]
Skin-to-Skin Architecture is about rethinking how we design cities and buildings, not just as objects we use, but as spaces that touch us back. Inspired by the power of skin-to-skin contact in neonatal care, where a caregiver’s touch stabilizes, calms, and connects, we ask: what if our built environment could do the same? In Skin-to-Skin, […]
In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to […]
Krater includes no landscape architects and follows no formal landscape architecture plan. Yet it is an intervention in landscape that stands as a provocative inquiry into the status of abandoned plots embedded within the urban fabric. The project poses fundamental questions: is a site truly ‘neglected’ if a thriving biotope has already taken hold? Could such a space, in its self-organized vitality, already constitute a form of an urban park? How to organize the social dimension? Krater unfolds as an expedition into landscape itself—an open-ended investigation in which fragmented architectural elements function as instruments of observation, experiment, and reflection. The site operates as a living laboratory, challenging conventional practices of open space production and the disciplinary boundaries of landscape architecture. It addresses relevant uncertainties the Anthropocene entails, engaging critically with issues of multi-species coexistence and the contested notion of environmental harmonization.
At a time when landscape architecture often seeks to simulate nature through aesthetic approximation or even mimicry, Krater seems oblivious to such representational impulses. Its proposition is radical in its restraint: rather than imposing form, it frames this ‘third landscape’ as a space of ecological processes, social encounter and experiment, revealing alternative logics of co-inhabitation, agency and design—logics that may become increasingly relevant as landscape architecture confronts its own ecological, ethical and epistemological limits.
– from the award statements
Exploring the interplay between low-res design and the transience of landscapes, this essay foregrounds the notion of resolution, enquiring about a dynamic interaction with landscapes in flux.
With our 21st century attentions challenged by endless streams of information on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, as well as blockbuster films supercharged by quick cuts and loads of special effects, Roundhay Garden Scene is improbably well suited for our age: who really has the time to spend more than 1 or 2 seconds on any one piece of visual content?2
Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire, an 8-hour long, black-and-white movie featuring a single shot of New York City’s Empire State Building, offers a useful counterpoint.
… what is the stage of AI in and outside the profession and discipline of landscape architecture? Many firms are now incorporating Generative AI into their workflow. Firms such as SWA have been able to fund research fellows exploring generative AI. Anecdotally, I have learned that other firms have similar internal initiatives. One trend is using LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models), a lightweight training technique that can “fine-tune” one’s Stable Diffusion models to generate images in a certain style.
As we confront the growing ecological crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that harmonious aesthetics, designed primarily for pleasure and ease, are always the most effective mode of expression. Perhaps there is space to question whether ecological efforts demand a different aesthetic attitude, one less fixated on traditional notions of balance and spatial conformity and more open to dissensus and confrontation.
Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices. Eichner is […]
Caio Reisewitz has created an artistic intervention in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, titled “Suspendre el Cel”. To Suspend the Sky is the artist’s reference to activists shamans Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak, alluding to Indigenous practices and beliefs of Amazonian people that the earth is made out of the sky, so the sky […]
In the current debate about climate change and its disruptive effects on the health of people and ecosystems, the reclamation of the ‘right to the environment’ has gained momentum, both in theoretical accounts and in legal documents. Yet, it is useful to make a first distinction between the right to the environment and the right of the environment.
Landscape architects usually think of compact greenery as the sound buffer minimizing noise pollution but we rarely think about specifically designing with sound, acoustics of space and the soundscape present at the site of intervention. Especially in the art scene, the sonification of plants, microbes, underwater creatures and their otherwise unheard processes, gained special attention […]
“Excerpts from a project on Trees and Beasts” Denise Hoffman Brandt© Denise Hoffman What do we actually mean when we talk about nature? As a professor in a discipline that since the early 1970s has, mostly, claimed to practice “design with nature”—referencing Ian McHarg’s book (1969) of that title—that’s a question I have often asked. […]
This summer, throughout Switzerland, you can attend the curated observation of the ongoing phenomenon of glaciers melting. Art installations, performances and exhibitions, scattered about the Alpine landscape, are informed by this exclusive moment in climate history that will forever change our landscapes. The melting progresses with the proportion of the loss of albedo surface. Although […]
In the talk, Lydia Kallipoliti – #architect #educator #researcher #thinker – presents her newly published book Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia, followed by a Q&A where we talk about the intentions of writing the book, about how the “waste speaks of the incomplete perception of the World”, the psychological profile of ecological designers and […]
Sh*tscapes is a 160-page book by London-based landscape architects Vladimir Guculak and Paul Bourel. They are also founders of studio gb, landscape architecture and design studio focused on the integration of nature into the city.
A post-industrial park is typically a sexy landmark, easy to make a story of, photogenic, and a palimpsest in itself. It presents a victory of public use over the private and industrial by opening previously closed-off spaces. A post-industrial park offers some crucial topics of remediation, adaptive reuse, and social integration, among others. For a […]
When we speak of Nature in cities, the question we want to stress is, is nature in cities natural or in fact an artefact? When we speak of natural processes, they of course take place but apart from spontaneous nature, left to random succession, emerging in spaces that Gilles Clément calls the third landscapes, there […]
HPO is an art and event-architecture group from Ferrara. Their work has been, among other venues, presented at Milan Design Week and 18. Venice Biennale.
In the interview, we discuss the marginal position, DIY, incomplete architecture and the importance of play.
Landezine talks to Andre Dekker, who, together with Ruud Reutelingsperger, Lieven Poutsma and Geert van de Camp, forms a public art collective Observatorium. In the video, Dekker gives a 30-minute-long presentation of some of Observatorium’s most recent and most important works. Their artworks traverse the realms of urban planning, landscape design, architectural innovation, and artistic […]
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 […]
Landezine met with Taktyk at the XII Barcelona International Landscape Biennial in November 2023, at the same place where we made the first interview, seven years ago. Taktyk’s work is a collage of collaborations showing sensitivity to the site, tackling its most vulnerable spots. Sébastien Penfornis and Thierry Kandjee seek through prospective visions, on-site works […]
We continue with French philosopher Michel Foucault. In his 1967 speech to an architecture audience, he introduced the concept of “heterotopia”. It was published in 1984 as an essay, Des Espaces Autres (Of Other Spaces), and it deals with the nature of space and its relation to society. Heterotopias are unique spatial entities that challenge conventional notions of space and compel reflection on the social, cultural, and ideological matters of our world.
Günther Vogt probably needs no introduction in our profession; he has been an important practitioner for a couple of decades now, appreciated globally for his rich, non-linear and adventurous design approach. Initially, his education was more in the direction of botany. He later shifted to landscape architecture by studying in Rapperswil, Switzerland. After his study […]
Sarah Cowles of Ruderal presents their design for the Betania Garden near Tbilisi, Georgia, which was awarded LILA 2023 Special Mention in the Garden category. We start the discussion with an update on Arsenal Oasis, another LILA-winning project from 2021 (See the presentation). For the Betania Garden, the LILA 2023 jury wrote: At first glance, […]
The production of landscape architecture projects has been in recent years outstanding, and our entire professional community has much to be proud of. But as always, there is a flip side; like in architecture or any design discipline of the globalised and speeding-up world, we are faced with a sea of sameness. Too many buildings […]
Urban biodiversity? Yes, please! Nevertheless … … Due to the transitional phase of our understanding of nature in the light of the Anthropocene, there are still some important notions, contradictions and misunderstandings that need to be addressed. To do so, we will operate with terms like nature, ecology, biodiversity, landscape, and aesthetics, and we’ll focus […]
»Paradigm shift« has been, for at least a decade now, one of the most used phrases in landscape architecture. We use it mainly to address the need to focus on design with natural processes in mind. This is important as it concerns our core values, attitude towards nature, the understanding of natural processes and the […]
In this essay, Zaš Brezar writes about the role of urban roofs in our collective memory. Illustrating the meaning of roofs through a selection of cultural references from films and music. The article is a part of Living Roofs focus on Landezine that is going on in October and November 2022.
Katarina Bajc is a landscape architect, currently working as a researcher at HafenCity University in Hamburg.
