Marcel Tröger runs studio erde, a practice based in Berlin and Zurich, with Violeta Burckhardt. He received the LILA 2022 Award for Young Professionals, and his other awards include the Schinkel Prize and the Lenné Prize. He teaches at HafenCity University Hamburg, where he is writing a PhD, developed alongside the practice, on principles for an art of building in the Anthropocene. In German, Erde means soil, earth and planet. The practice works across that range of scales, bodies and materials, bringing different kinds of expertise together to give each site a precise response.

At Wilder Platz in Zurich, for example, studio erde turned a leftover strip beside the railway tracks into a landscape shared by humans and other species, built with recycled materials through a participatory process. On the former Garzweiler open-pit mine near Jüchen, the practice is developing Neu-Jüchen, a new quarter that begins repopulating the site by planting a forest. Here, Tröger speaks about the polyphonic method, the emerging aesthetics of landscape, the scale at which the profession should work, where it needs to develop, and how to make room for dialogue.

“Office for anthropocene landscapes” is the slogan for studio erde. What does it say about your practice? Aren’t all landscapes Anthropocene?

Yes, in a way, every landscape is an Anthropocene landscape. Even a place that looks or feels untouched is connected to human systems and decisions: through water, climate, land use, extraction, or the movement of materials but also through thought. We create landscapes the moment that we think of them. It is in itself a human construct. As Lefebvre describes, there are different degrees of urbanization, but no landscape exists entirely outside these relationships.

So the name does not claim that we work on a special category of landscapes. It describes how we approach them: our agenda and our position. We are not designing against the Anthropocene, or for a time after it. We know the concepts circulating around it, such as the Chthulucene or the Plantationocene, but for us it is more fruitful to develop a strong design position within the Anthropocene.

“It is fruitful to develop a strong design position within the Anthropocene.”

When we design, we try to recognize the different scales and entanglements already present in a place. A decision about a tree, or a water system, is never only local; it has consequences elsewhere and over deep time. We cannot treat a site as an isolated surface.

For us, office for anthropocene landscapes is a commitment to take that complexity seriously and to work with it through design, across scales, species, materials, and time. That can be uncomfortable, because there is rarely one clean solution. But it is also where new spatial possibilities emerge.

Your PhD is titled Polyphonic Landscapes – Towards a Baukunst for the Anthropocene. About polyphonic landscapes as a method – in your practice, how do you begin a project, and how do you approach the site?

We rarely begin with a fixed idea of what a site should become. We try to reveal and decode what is already there, working with filters, or lenses: water and soil, existing habitats, material flows, histories, everyday uses, maintenance, but also the planning rules and technical constraints that shape what is possible. Many of these relationships are invisible at a glance.

“We define our own Wirkraum. Defining it also means asking quite practical questions: Where can we act? What are the constraints? How far can we push the existing framework?”

I draw a lot on Erik Swyngedouw’s writing on socio-ecological and urban metabolism: following water and material flows, habitat and sediment systems, but also human practices, stretching outward from a specific site. Where does water want to go? How far do habitats extend?

We use hybrid mapping, observation, and sometimes very direct, sensory ways of working to filter this complexity. We define our own Wirkraum, the field of relationships within which the project can actually intervene. This field often blurs the boundary of the site, which is harder to argue for in a competition than in academia, because projects are limited by legal and political borders. Defining it also means asking quite practical questions: Where can we act? What are the constraints? How far can we push the existing framework?

For me, the most important moment is when this research becomes a design position. We try to identify a particular tension or problem within the site and build a strong spatial narrative around it. A polyphonic approach does not mean trying to show everything at once. It means understanding the different voices and forces at work, then finding a precise intervention that brings some of those relationships into a new constellation and lets people sense them.

How much does it matter to you what a landscape looks like? If design matters because it carries shared values such as inclusivity, is appearance beyond that irrelevant? How does the climate crisis influence landscape architecture design?

Appearance matters very much to me. It is always a question of form, and one of the central questions of my PhD is what the art of building, a Baukunst of the Anthropocene, could be.

I see a certain clash in our field, especially in Germany and especially in academia. Ecological and conceptual research and theoretical debate often seem separated from design theory and spatial practice: you do ecology, the speculative stuff; we do design.

“We need to overcome the dualism: ‘you do ecology,’ ‘we do design.’ We have to ask how ecological processes themselves can become part of a project and radically inform its spatial and aesthetic thinking.”

We need to overcome this dualism. We cannot develop an ecological solution and then give it an attractive appearance, or create a nicely designed place in search of contemporary forms. We have to ask how ecological processes themselves can become part of a project and radically inform its spatial and aesthetic thinking.

How do water, soil, plants, or material cycles shape a place, and how can design make these relationships perceptible? I am interested in the moment when you can experience, in a very particular and earthly place, an entanglement that also operates at a planetary scale. This is where the question of form becomes exciting for me.

For example, Christophe Girot writes that the transformative power of landscape lies in re-exploring archetypes. That is the balancing act we work in: finding spatial archetypes that remain sensitive to larger entanglements. Garden history holds so much knowledge about structures and plants, and I feel we use it far too little in current projects. At Benjamin Franklin Square in Mannheim, for example, we are designing the square as one large canopy, an arboretum of around 70 climate trees that also works as natural air conditioning. By mixing species, there may be a potential for a new aesthetic of an archetype.

The climate crisis makes the question of form more urgent, though it has always been relevant. It changes what and whom we design for, but also how we think about beauty: a landscape changes with rain, drought, seasons, and time. Its appearance is part of how we perceive and understand those processes. That is why I want ecological knowledge and design thinking to work much more closely together. I believe the real reward lies in between, in the friction, in cultivating differences, in framing the new with the old.

In an interview for ARCH+ with Regine Keller by Alex Nehmer, you argued that landscape architecture needs to work at a larger scale, the scale of planning, because the Anthropocene can’t be addressed only at the scale of a pocket park (not that pocket parks aren’t needed). How is the climate crisis pushing the discipline toward that scale, and what does working there look like for a landscape architect?

We are always designing systems, working with water cycles, designing habitats. Even a small project is connected to the territorial scale. When I speak about working at a larger scale, though, I also mean how we understand our relevance within the planning field, and that we need to be louder. What roles do we accept and create for ourselves as landscape architects?

In the interview, we referred to contexts such as France or the US, where landscape architects have more opportunities to lead projects of territorial change. I studied in France, where paysagisme brings design and landscape planning much closer together. That shaped my understanding that design is a spatial task at every scale, including the territorial one.

“How we understand our relevance at a larger scale, within the planning field? We need to be louder. Design is a spatial task at every scale, including the territorial one.”

In Germany, there is still a strong divide between landscape design and landscape planning. At the larger scale, the work is often left to a more technocratic approach. Education swings back and forth too. I trained in a combined bachelor’s program; now the two have been separated again, as seems to happen every twenty years or so. The larger scale is exactly where we need to combine different kinds of knowledge: systems thinking and technical expertise, very specific knowledge of plants and habitats, but also sensory, atmospheric, and dynamic design tools.

Working at the territorial scale means bringing these perspectives together and giving them spatial form. It means collaborating differently, in planning practice and in academia. We speak a lot about multidisciplinarity, but we have to ask what it looks like when these forms of knowledge shape a project together. Working with artists, heritage experts, or ecologists always brings conflict, but it is extremely rewarding.

At the Haus der Statistik, you are collaborating with Robin Winogrond, and the approach seems close to the Park of Encounters by Winogrond and Studio Vulkan: uncovering a site’s layers, found objects, and juxtaposing them. Do you see this method as a political act? How do you see the relationship between ecology, the Anthropocene, and politics?

I think Robin’s position and ours are very complementary. We work in an almost archaeological way, observing closely what is already on a site, its layers, traces, and found materials. We connect this reading to metabolism and ecological processes: what moves through a place, what can be reused, and what forms of life it supports.

“Uncovering layers is not automatically a political act. It becomes problematic when you flatten their depth. The political question is whose histories and needs become visible, and who gets to decide, including more-than-human needs and voices.”

At Haus der Statistik, these ways of thinking could really come together. Rather than designing a classical square, we identified 15 objects, traces that are still on the site or once were: a church built and destroyed three times over three centuries, an underground tunnel, trees that connect to the planting history of the GDR. In relation to one another, they create a stage, what we call the Stadt.Bühne. In this project, we act more as curators than designers.

The project’s temporary and experimental framework also gave us an opportunity to test things directly. We were able to work with the existing and allow new uses and relationships to emerge. It was planned to last three to four years. Now the district of Mitte has decided it should stay for twenty or thirty years. Because the city would not take on construction or maintenance, we proposed founding an association to care for the place, and we ran workshops with its members.

This also points to a political dimension of the Anthropocene that we encounter constantly in practice: a mismatch of temporalities. Ecological conditions are changing at enormous speed and require us to observe, react and adapt continuously. But political and administrative systems often operate according to very different timeframes. Planning procedures are designed to fix conditions and responsibilities, while the landscapes we are working with are increasingly dynamic and unpredictable. Bureaucracy has little capacity for spontaneity or adaptation, and that can directly limit our ability to respond to ecological change. For me, designing for the Anthropocene therefore also means creating processes that can learn and change over time.

However, uncovering layers is not automatically a political act. It becomes problematic when you flatten their depth. There is a risk of turning a difficult history into an aesthetic of found objects. For me, the political question is whose histories and needs become visible, and who gets to decide, including more-than-human needs and voices: rivers, mountains, insects. As planners, we are part of this web of relationships ourselves; we do not stand outside it and simply organize it. So ecology and politics meet in very concrete design decisions: what we keep, what we remove, what we make accessible, and for whom, or for what, we create space.

Your project Aquifer Machines was part of the exhibition Life, Plant, City: 100 Years of Geddes’ Plan for Tel Aviv’s Garden City at Liebling Haus in Tel Aviv. It followed the coastal aquifer, the groundwater beneath the city and beyond. What did you find?

We found that water offers a very different reading of Tel Aviv, and of the contested territories connected to it. The coastal aquifer extends across political borders, from Israel through Gaza toward Sinai. So water is a medium of connection. But that connection does not mean shared access. Water is extracted, controlled, cut off, and damaged in profoundly unequal ways. That tension became central to Aquifer Machines.

Geddes understood the city as an organism and the territory as a system of relationships. Interestingly, his plan pays far more attention to airways than to waterways, which is one reason we chose to work with water. We wanted to take his idea seriously and ask what it would mean to read Liebling Haus, as part of a much larger water system. It is an old residential building, with very familiar domestic rooms, but those rooms are connected to atmospheric processes, infrastructures, and political decisions far beyond the house.

There, we designed three interventions as plug-ins to that system. On the street, a fog shower invited the visitors to enter. On the roof, a dew collector engaged with the atmosphere. In the bathroom, perhaps the most intimate space in the house but also a deeply political one when we think about access to water, a dynamic mapping of the aquifer brought this territorial condition into an everyday domestic setting.

We tried to make the house an interface and a representation through which visitors could sense these relationships, be confronted with them, and encounter hidden and uncomfortable layers, moving from the scale of a room to the scale of the aquifer and back again.

Following the water, the project opens a field of discourse that political conflict has shut down and made unbearable. How difficult is it to work there now?

It has become extremely difficult. Aquifer Machines says a lot about water as a political medium, because the aquifer does not follow the borders and divisions that structure life above ground. It is a shared ecological system, but access to it, its use and its condition are profoundly unequal. In Gaza, the aquifer remains an essential and increasingly fragile resource, while Tel Aviv is much less dependent on it because of large-scale desalination.

What interests me is precisely this contradiction: ecologically, these territories cannot really be separated. Water moves between them, the aquifer connects them, atmospheric processes connect them. Politically, however, the space in which we can talk about these relationships has become smaller and smaller.

“Our paradigms sometimes seem stronger than our capacity for dialogue. For me, that makes projects like ‘Aquifer Machines’ even more relevant. Landscape cannot resolve political conflict, of course. But it can reveal relations that political narratives tend to divide or make invisible.”

And this is not only something I experience in Israel. I feel it in Europe, and in Berlin as well, also within academia. Positions have hardened to a point where nuanced discussion can become very difficult. Our paradigms sometimes seem stronger than our capacity for dialogue.

For me, that makes projects like Aquifer Machines even more relevant. Landscape cannot resolve political conflict, of course. But it can reveal relations that political narratives tend to divide or make invisible. Following water allows us to look at the territory differently—not by overcoming its conflicts, but by showing that ecological systems continue to connect places and lives even when politics separates them.

You mentioned that dialogue has broken down in academia too. You teach at HafenCity University Hamburg, and have taught in Berlin and Cottbus. What do you give students to work on, and how do they respond? What catches them, what bores them, and how has your own education shaped your teaching?

For me, teaching is about creating a critical understanding of the challenges we face, and then developing design methods to work within them. I often give students quite radical tasks. I want them to question how a site or territory is usually described before deciding what they might do there. This openness is often challenging for students at first. But what catches them is the moment when their own reading of the place reveals a possibility they could not see before. The uncertainty becomes productive, and they become enthusiastic about what they can do with it. I sense a stronger awareness of our current problems among students, but also a lot of fear of designing, of doing too much, of testing, of being loud. Perhaps it comes from knowing we live in a crisis. That is why we have to teach design itself. If students do not develop a critical design position at school, it is very hard to find one later in practice.

“I want students to become ‘Transformationsgestalterinnen*’, designers of transformation who can understand systems and translate that understanding into spatial proposals.”

I teach a polyphonic methodology, based on projects and studio experience, but I do not define the Wirkraum for the students. They have to define it themselves, using filters and moving between a microscopic and a macroscopic view. They map the place, sense it, feel it, get to know it, and find ways to show what they have discovered. Through this process, they decide which relations become important and where they might intervene. For me, the way you look, reveal, and represent are already design decisions.

Often working with architects and urban planners, I am especially interested in bringing systemic landscape thinking into their work, constantly jumping in between the micro and the macro to understand design as relational practice: polyphonic mapping, sensing strategies and local interventions, prototyping at 1:1, or on a territorial level, speculating on new city-landscape figures by negotiating urban-rural relationships. When they begin to see landscape as a way of thinking and designing relations, rather than simply as the space around a building, it becomes exciting.

My own education across landscape architecture and urban design shaped this approach. I want students to think across scales and disciplines, and to become Transformationsgestalterinnen*: designers of transformation who can understand systems and translate that understanding into spatial proposals.