We spoke with four partners of taktyk, Thierry Kandjee, Sébastien Penfornis, Thania Sakellaroiu, and Simon Auperpin, about their work spanning more than twenty years, presented in an anthology they are launching this week at the IFLA World Congress in Hong Kong.
Public space need not address everyone in order to accommodate them. The indifferent artifact follows an order of its own, entering public space as another stranger. It leaves the spectator’s role unassigned, introducing a form of alienation in which coexistence requires neither intimacy, identification nor agreement.
Landezine talks to Marcel Tröger of studio erde about polyphonic landscapes, the emerging aesthetics of the Anthropocene, and the need for landscape architects to work at a territorial scale. From ecological processes to the politics of water, he discusses how design can reveal hidden relationships and open space for dialogue.
Günther Vogt, 2025 LILA Honour Award recipient, on design rules disguised as technical standards, participation overruled by regulation, why his own office hires mostly architects, and why landscape architects should walk, read texts in the field and decide. A strolling interview around Ithaca, Manhattan, and Ljubljana.
Mateja Kurir talks to Michael Marder, a philosopher of plant life, about the place of plants in Western thought, vegetal time, Chernobyl, waste and fire, and what landscape architects might learn from treating the ground as active and the landscape as a collaborator.
Landezine talks to Mark Wigley about landscape as a form of human exceptionalism, the politics of soil, architecture’s long separation from microbial life, and why landscape design may now be one of the most politically charged fields of practice.
At Mumbai’s forest edge, a leopard crossing the boundary of Sanjay Gandhi National Park also crosses between administrative categories: protected wildlife inside the park, and outside it, potentially an intrusion, a threat or a management problem.
Kate Orff on landscape architecture as activism, the limits of “buffering,” Petrochemical America, Living Breakwaters, and why the profession must look beyond individual projects to the larger ecological systems already in collapse.
EXTERIORLESS is the term Corbo coined to investigate the condition of logistics infrastructures, a spatial byproduct that signifies the entanglement of capitalism and society. However gloomy, the analysis Corbo offers is meant as groundwork for action, not resignation.
We talked to Dermot Foley, an Irish landscape architect and founder of DFLA, about risk, reuse, ecological processes, working between the planned and the unexpected, and how their projects emerge from small things.
Phoebe Lickwar is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and director of FORGE Landscape Architecture, a practice working at the intersection of agriculture, carbon, and design. Her first book, Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes (Routledge, 2020), co-authored with Roxi Thoren, is a study of […]
Just like many other countries in the Western world, Sweden has experienced a powerful wave of urbanization in recent decades. During this period, cities have primarily grown “inward.” In defunct harbors and former industrial areas—often in waterfront locations—a “block-city” has been formed. These take clear inspiration from early 20th-century grid plans, featuring public ground floors with […]
Landscape architects are rarely funny, argues Alex Breedon (Offcuts), and their humour rarely seeps into the work itself. This op-ed traces why that is, from professional caution to fear of frivolity, and makes the case for laughter as a serious tool for processing grief, protest and absurdity.
Annemarie Bucher teaches Landscape Theory and History at ETH Zürich. Here, she shares insights on critical reading of landscapes and new approaches to landscape historiography.
We are publishing the article by Catalina Picón, landscape architect, and co-founder of Fundación Cerros Isla, on the Cerros Isla restoration in Santiago, Chile. The platform behind it is built on environmental compensation — a regulatory requirement imposed on companies whose development projects generate excess PM10 emissions. Fundación Cerros Isla acts as a broker, channeling those obligations toward restoration sites — in this case, the degraded hills surrounding the city.
While the ecological work the platform performs is real, it is worth saying: ecology cannot be offset. Restoration tied to a pollution debt is not the same as restoration as public commitment, or lowering environmental and social impact in the first place. The difference has consequences for who is responsible for these landscapes in the long run.
The hills themselves — degraded, privately owned, worked over by extraction and neglect — are the kind of ground landscape architects encounter constantly. We share this article to hear your experience with similar instruments. What do they make possible, and at what cost.
Authors of the text are Catalina Picon, Executive Director of Fundación Cerros Isla from 2017 to 2025, Gabriela Castillo, and Fernanda Ruiz.
Interview with Billy Fleming on landscape architecture’s service to capital and what design could become in a just postcarbon transition: moving beyond heroic projects toward public ownership, community power, land justice and political action.
Robin Hueppe writes about Berlin’s post-war housing estates as landscapes shaped by war rubble, landfills, water engineering and ecological succession, revealing the buried histories and environmental agency beneath and around mass housing projects.
Medina Novoa is interested in transatlantic narratives and the ecological and cultural co-production of landscapes. Her research follows a single tree species, Araucaria araucana, from its native forests in southern Chile and Argentina into the ornamental gardens of Georgian and Victorian Britain, unfolding the wider social, ecological, and cultural entanglements that shaped how nature was seen, classified, transplanted, and designed with.
“There may have been fogs for centuries in London … But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.” — Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” In Intentions. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1891. “I like to think that […]
From June 29 to July 2, with the exhibition extended until July 19, Barcelona will host the UIA World Congress of Architects for the second time in its history, under the theme Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition. Chosen through an international competition, the theme was developed by a curatorial team of six Barcelona-based […]
The Australian practice OFFICE recently published the book Aqua Nullius: First Nations Water Rights in Australia. The book presents a rich cross-section of Aboriginal culture and struggle for land and water rights through chapters on Storytelling, Water Injustice, First Nations Water Management and Overturning Aqua Nullius. Title, inspired by Virginia Marshall’s Overturning aqua nullius: securing […]
Sea-level rise caused by anthropogenic climate change poses an existential threat to coastal cities worldwide. By 2100, the IPCC projects a global mean sea-level rise of between 0.3 and 1.0 metres under moderate scenarios, with some estimates reaching 2 metres under extreme conditions, given Marine Ice Cliff Instability in Antarctica and accelerating melt dynamics in […]
The movie Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) stages one of the most ambiguous encounters with Versailles on film, compressed into a single scene. About a minute long, it condenses the purpose of the garden, the political gravity of its design, and an experience that seeks emancipation …
Piet Oudolf talks to filmmaker and planting specialist Arjan Boekel of De Bloeimeesters in the garden at Hummelo, about what planting design for the 21st-century issues actually requires, and where the profession still falls short.
In the article we search for landscape architecture projects that resist the temptation of resigning control or creating spectacle. Environmental stoicism – working with existing conditions proves productive force in design approach.
Thomas Balsley is a central figure in shaping contemporary public space in New York City, with a career spanning more than four decades. His work has focused on transforming post-industrial waterfronts into resilient and socially active public landscapes. His portfolio includes more than 100 projects, among them Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, Gantry Plaza State […]
Recently, a case of a huge pink rabbit lying ‘dead’ in a mountainous terrain circulated on social media. The odd situation caught our attention. Hase by Gelitin produces a defamiliarising effect on the landscape — the body of a dreamy vernacular landscape is invaded.
Ed’s new book, published by Jovis, traces the entanglements between spatial design and the expanding geography of war. It began, as Ed explains, with a moment of bitter revelation during his years in practice as a landscape architect …
The forest has recently become a site of renewed interest — not only in philosophy and the humanities, but also in art and aesthetic theory. Many reasons lie behind this return, all closely tied to the tensions of our present moment. We speak with philosopher and co-editor of Forest Encounters, Mateja Kurir.
Jürgen Weidinger on the pressures shaping landscape architecture today — from climate anxiety and public budgets to design culture and the next generation, and where the ways forward might be found.
Topophilia, the affective bond to place, presumes duration through which meaning accumulates. Under accelerating transformation, places are altered, degraded, or erased. Design, we argue, cannot produce places, it can only frame conditions where it may emerge and allow for attachment, not secure it.
Literature is abundant on enclosed landscapes; from atriums, private gardens and patios, to large courtyards, cemeteries and spaces of worship. One thing seems to be in common to all: enclosure functions not only as a protective device, but also produces a world.
Alessandro Martinelli writes about how Taichung Central Park reveals a conflict between design and governance systems built on institutional trust and “appropriateness”. He stresses that procurement culture, political dynamics, and maintenance regimes can undermine ambitious landscape projects.
We talk to Stephen Buckle about drawing as a thinking tool, landscape as urban system rather than surface, negotiating development pressures, rejecting fixed styles in favour of place response, and why landscape architects must take a stronger leadership role in shaping dense cities.
Landscape architecture operates through territorial displacement but rarely narrates it. Sense of place must also include the geographies embedded in supply chains. Otherwise it becomes aesthetic traditionalism, concealing its material contradictions as the ecological crisis unfolds.
Anti-render flips the golden-hour fantasy. What if your project is seen on a grey November Tuesday instead of a May evening? A look at AI tools that strip away atmosphere and expose what design really stands on once people, light and seasonal charm disappear.
Rob Beswick examines how the Urban Greening Factor and Biodiversity Net Gain are reshaping landscape practice in the UK, arguing that while both policies advance environmental recovery, their success depends on integrating metrics with design quality, social value, and long-term resilience.
We talk to Chiara Geroldi about how landscape architecture can engage with the growing landscapes of discarded soil, the importance of making material processes legible, and how design can approach material surplus for shaping post-industrial and infrastructural topographies.
Ibrahim Diaz writes on how technical and ecological performance can act as an alibi for spatially weak landscapes. He argues that technical metrics are important, but risk replacing design ambition.
This article critiques how industrial “clock-time” and efficiency-driven planning structure urban life. It examines the shift from spatial mapping to “chrono-urbanism,” using isochrones and rhythmic analysis to reveal how transport and institutional schedules distribute time and access unequally.
Historic gardens are in most cases preserved through visual continuity, yet climate change exposes the ecological instability beneath their timelessness. The article argues that heritage landscapes are to reveal, not conceal, this rupture—shifting toward a cultivated sense of change.
Žiga Malek on Natural Climate Solutions: their mitigation potential, limits, and land-use trade-offs, on how ecosystem protection, not tree planting alone, offers major benefits but cannot replace fossil fuel cuts, and how effective climate action requires systemic changes and realistic land use.
An interview with PAN Associati and EMF on the LILA 2025-winning Parco della Pace. Born from a former military airfield in Vicenza, this “non-muscular” design uses soil movement and groundwater to create a low-cost, 65-hectare landscape that prioritizes ecological processes.
Kristoffer Holm Pedersen of SLA writes about how architecture media sidelines landscape and urban design. As climate and biodiversity crises intensify, he argues the issue is not just visibility but value, and whether image-driven platforms can host slow, systemic, ecological design.
On the occasion of Topotek 1’s 30th anniversary, Martin Rein-Cano reflects on the firm’s practice. The interview covers projects old and new, the rejection of visual harmony, and the role of unscripted public space in mediating social and urban conflict.
Robert Schäfer and Urška Škerl speak to Mechtild Rössler about the evolving World Heritage Convention. They discuss the defining threat of climate change, the imbalance of the World Heritage List, and how landscape architecture—through “sponge city” concepts—can protect global heritage.
This text examines adaptive reuse not as an ecological strategy, but as a condition of misfit between material persistence and use. It argues that productive surplus emerges when past and present functions remain simultaneously legible, forcing users to negotiate meaning, norms, and use within a low-resolution landscape.
Air traffic has undergone significant changes since it became available to a wider population. The commercialisation of air travel, supported by reduced costs and technological development, increased the size of passenger terminals and the overall footprint of airports, driving urban and infrastructural transformation. At the same time, the life cycle of an airport is unpredictable, […]
