Estudio Ome on how the goal of its landscapes ‘is to provoke, even through a subtle detail, an experience’

The idea of ‘balance’ sits at the heart of Estudio Ome’s work. The young landscape architecture firm from Mexico City, founded in 2018 by the Franco-Mexican duo Hortense Blanchard and Susana Rojas Saviñón, has always questioned ‘how we interact with nature and where to intervene to get the perfect balance between what is built and what is alive’, they explain. Bringing together different elements and consolidating learnings from diverse aspects of the creative and physical world has been a powerful tool for the pair.

Enter the world of Estudio Ome in Mexico

This duality appears in various other aspects of their work – they combine practice and theory, using drawing as a means for exploration and learning, as well as a means to shape a place; and they seek to unite art and ecology. They explain: ‘Art as the search for beauty, for the poetic; our goal is to provoke, even through a subtle detail, an experience, a source of inspiration and interpretation. We define ecology from an ethical perspective as the utmost respect towards nature; each time we have a commission, we ask ourselves: is the place going to be better with our intervention or is it better to do nothing?’

As a result of their delicate and at the same time impactful designs, the awards have kept coming. Among them, the pair has scooped ‘Outstanding Project’ at the 2025 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP); the top gong at the 2024 Rethinking the Future Awards in the Private Landscape category; and a special mention at the 2023 Landezine International Landscape Award’s Private Gardens category.

This has also afforded them a growing portfolio of international work. Working on both sides of the Atlantic, they have been broadening their practice in Mexico and France, expanding this year to the UK too. The 2022 project, The Ruins, a private garden in Mexico, has been central to the evolution of their practice.

Here, they worked with a series of existing ecosystems and hydrology management strategies for harvesting run-off water from the site to create a thriving composition of stone, water and planting. It is a design that does not represent a single moment in time. Every four months, they return to it for maintenance, which adds to their deep understanding of the place and enriches its present and future.

The five-strong studio is currently working on an art foundation project with Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, for which they have been developing their landscape solution in a rich dialogue with the buildings on site. ‘From the very beginning, the process has been shaped by an accumulation of notes from the clients and architects. We have been redrawing the architectural project, its materiality, and changing the qualities of light. This methodology has allowed us to have bold concepts that can be rapidly sketched,’ they say.

‘We have included drawings of plants observed at the Botanical Garden of the National University. In these, our intention is to show the foliage, the patterns, the movement of the stem, density, and the movement in time, qualities often difficult to express in a project presentation otherwise. For us, hand drawing brings movement, brings the notion of time, and isn’t that what landscape is all about?’

Even though they are optimistic about the future of their field, Rojas Saviñón and Blanchard flag the need for more opportunities for education among landscape professionals and their clients: ‘In Mexico, where we have been working for the past eight years, what’s missing is more education, more possibilities to study. There is a growing number of people interested in the field, and there is work. Hand-in-hand with this comes the perception of the profession. Often, expectations are reduced to planting palettes. Our hope is that through broader visibility of the possibilities that landscape holds, richer collaborations will arise.’