A new addition to the Vitra Campus, 'Water Garden' by Bas Smets, marks the start of summer for the celebrated furniture manufacturer and its famous headquarters on the Swiss-German border. Launched today (17 June 2026), during Art Basel, the design is a highly site-specific piece by the Belgian landscape architect – and one that is more than it might initially seem.

It's been a tradition for the Vitra home in Weil am Rhein to unveil an exciting new project on its campus every summer. Water Garden follows Vitra's reveal last year of Doshi Retreat, 2024's Khudi Bari, and 2023's Tane Garden House. This time, the offering is the result of a long and ongoing collaboration between Smets and the manufacturer. The aim? To make the latter's large campus, full of landmark architecture, more climate resilient.

Explore Bas Smets’ Water Garden at the Vitra Campus

The patch of land that is now transformed, in true Smets-style, into the fresh, living, breathing ecosystem that is the Water Garden, sits right by Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum. It all started in 2023, when Smets proposed planting 8,000 young trees across the site in order to establish 'micro-forests' based on the principles of Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who argued for the restoration of ecosystems by mimicking the way natural forests grow and evolve. It formed a thoughtful response to Vitra's mission to rewild its home.

'The first building on the campus was a factory and office building completed in 1954. It was built on what had previously been a garden. So, the campus began with the destruction of a beautiful natural site. And over the following decades, with the expansion of factory space, many cherry trees disappeared without anyone questioning the loss,' says Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman emeritus at Vitra.

'A shift in thinking began in 1994 with Tadao Ando’s conference building, which was placed within a cherry orchard so carefully that only three trees had to be removed. This marked the first moment when the relationship between architecture and nature was reconsidered on the campus. Tree planting began in front of the VitraHaus by Herzog & de Meuron in 2010, followed by the first comprehensive landscape plan developed with Günther Vogt around 2015. But the true breakthrough came with the Oudolf Garden in 2021 – a project that felt like a reconciliation with the earlier decades of destruction. With the garden as a new point of reference, every aspect of the campus was re-examined through a different lens.'

The Water Garden plot is centred on a large pond. It is wrapped in trees and aquatic vegetation, with an emphasis on biodiversity and resilience, as the species were carefully positioned and selected to attract birds and support fish, allowing wildlife to thrive within the campus. Some 500 cubic metres of earth were dug out to make the pond, and were then used to make the berm surrounding it.

'It is this beautiful combination of landscape architecture and art,' Smets says, highlighting the way he hopes his work will grow to play a role within the wider campus, amid the classic works by the likes of Gehry, Ando, Balkrishna Doshi, Zaha Hadid and more. Smets continues to explain: 'The landscape is also something that connects all these objects, which changes the relationship [between them].'

Working with Vitra was an exciting challenge and fruitful collaboration for Smets. 'I love the idea that they're so used to testing a chair before it goes into the market [and] I thought, “OK, let's prototype a landscape”, and they wanted me to do it,' he says. 'No city would want you to prototype. They want the real thing now, right?'

More is yet to come. Beyond the growth and care of the wider project across the site, at Water Garden, three large-scale ceramic sculptures by designer Hella Jongerius – part of her Angry Animals series – are set to be installed as fountains. Plans won't stop there, Fehlbaum explains. Right now, a fish-shaped bench by Doshi and a small, original demountable 4x4 prefabricated house by Jean Prouvé are also positioned by the pond.

'With the Oudolf Garden in mind, we looked at all aspects of the campus with new eyes,’ says Fehlbaum. ‘It was at this moment that Bas entered the picture. He analysed the entire site and proposed a long-term ecological strategy that would gradually transform the campus biosphere. The first visible result is the Miyawaki Forest, followed by the Water Garden. More steps will follow: reducing paved surfaces, planting additional Miyawaki forests, and continuing to restore biodiversity across the grounds.'

The Water Garden opens to the public on 17 June 2026 at Vitra Campus, Charles-Eames-Straße 2, 79576 Weil am Rhein, Germany

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The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 (the event's 113th edition, on until 23 May) is underway, a week-long throng of eager garden visitors, design devotees and botanical enthusiasts. Some 145,000 guests, in fact, are expected to fill the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea to explore the 18 dynamic show gardens, 21 container, balcony and houseplant gardens on show; including three main feature gardens and the garlanded Great Pavilion of the world’s most prestigious gardening event.

Enter the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026

The hope, always, is that one comes away with a level of rounded inspiration: to have scribbled down the name of a charismatic plant or three, and – if you’re like me – to have seen an architectural aesthetic or approach to landscape design in a new, flattering light. Increasingly, there is even hope of encountering the glint of a greener, more sustainable future.

This was certainly the case last year. Pervading the exhibits of Chelsea 2025 was a growing sense of the show’s potential as a platform for progressive thinking: of designers looking with evident sincerity at how gardens – in both their soft and hard features – can push beyond beauty to tackle the climatic conundrums of the day. Floodwater management, landscape conservation and the repurposing of rubble aggregates were all themes explored within the show’s gardens. Emphasising sustainability felt like heralding a year of tentative readjustment.

Chelsea Flower Show 2026 trends

Reuse

There are, of course, echoes of that readjustment in the themes of the Chelsea Flower Show 2026. To start with, recycled materials are prominently displayed. As in last year’s ‘Hospitalfield Arts Garden’, designed by landscape architect Nigel Dunnett – who sadly passed away last month, leaving an astonishing legacy and a great hole in the horticultural world – we see aggregates and structural elements repurposed as the foundation of some of 2026’s gardens. Chelsea veteran Tom Stuart Smith reimagines a garden for Tate Britain; its paving and circular block seating reuses elements from the Tate’s existing site. Meanwhile, Patrick Clarke’s rust-chic garden for The Children’s Society recycles steel rafters.

AI

We note the return of AI, too. Introduced at last year’s show by garden designer Tom Massey as an innovative way of monitoring tree health, 2026 now sees the tool employed in the design of three of the show’s gardens, raising concerns over a precarious future for garden designers. It coincides with celebrated garden designer Matt Keightley launching a garden design app this year, Spacelift, which uses AI to assist bewildered garden owners in making headway with their outdoor spaces.

Climate change mitigation

Once again, climate change mitigation surfaces in various exhibits, not least in the solar-panelled classroom shelter at the heart of the Eden Project’s very beautiful ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ garden, and its cockleshell-infused terrace footing. There’s also the welcomed emphasis on accessibility, with gardens being conceived as navigable for all, from the smoothness and materials of guiding pathways to the acuteness of angles and gradients. This is evidenced in the graded steps and rest points of Angus Thompson’s immersive woodland-edge garden, and again in Tom Stuart Smith’s Tate Britain garden, with its illuminated, sensory-stimulating pathway.

Narratives

Amid everything, there is a distinct theme of ‘narrative’ this year: of taking prime users and would-be garden visitors on an intentional, educational or exploratory journey through the gardens. In conceiving her show garden for the charity Parkinson’s UK, garden designer-cum-television presenter Arit Anderson has been explicit in this theme, addressing the complexity of the neurological condition via a defined serpentine route through contrasting areas of planting. Guided by a tactile water-rilled hand rail (neatly branded a ‘hand-rill’) made of smooth engineered Accoya wood, those experiencing the effects of Parkinson’s are given the space and security to navigate the garden at leisure. Deeply concave, the bold rails convey the trickling of water as it follows a path adorned with colourful, fragrant and medicinal plantings.

Water

Anderson’s garden leads us neatly, too, to the definitive theme of 2026: water, water everywhere. It flows near-continuously through the show ground. If last year's designers were puzzling over the importance of water capture and conservation (Dunnett’s rainwater-harvesting ‘dune pool’, Baz Grainger’s permeable pathways, Ryan McMahon’s marine ‘seagrass’ garden), this year they are positively revelling in the stuff, celebrating its vital, calming, life-giving quality. And as in Anderson’s hand-rill, here is where the show’s hardscape design reveals its ingenuity.

Water courses through the elegant, snaking rill of the Tate Britain garden; it reflects from the giant stone basin of Imogen Perreau’s foxglove-punctuated scheme in the Great Pavilion. Pooled water brightens the planting of the Eden Project’s ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ garden and the Japanese courtyard by seasoned Chelsea gold medal winner Kazuyuki Ishihara. In the smaller Balcony and Container gardens, water pours into iron cauldrons, bubbles up into stone planters and streams down the vertical copper of May Starey’s Balcony garden for Scottish distiller, Fettercairn Whisky.

Copper

To continue with the theme of copper, this is undoubtedly the prominent, saturating colour of this year’s show more widely. Earthy tones, to speak more generally: it’s in the giant sandstone mounds of the Project Giving Back garden by James Basson (masterfully brought to life by Mark Whyman Landscapes); it’s in Angus Thompson’s distinctly red-brown soil and the terracotta walls of Frances Tophill’s feature ‘Curious Garden’ for the RHS and The King’s Foundation.

Most striking, perhaps, are the structural clay-rendered walls of Darren Hawks’s ‘Silent No More’ garden, inspired by the work of Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. Against this copper foil, dark elders, silvery subshrubs, wandering species roses and magnetising ‘Benton’ irises pop across the show ground, in an echo of Sarah Price’s still-lauded 2023 Cedric Morris-inspired show garden.

Chelsea Flower Show highlights

Having bumbled around the show ground, drawn like a nectar-intoxicated bee from one beauty to another, here are some of our not-to-be-missed contributions that define the Chelsea Flower Show 2026.

The Show Gardens

Two are the standouts this year: Patrick Clarke’s The Children’s Society Garden, with its remarkable cohesion of colour stemming from the prominent recycled steel rafters; and the Eden Project’s 'Bring Me Sunshine’ garden, inspired by the landscapes of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, where the educational charity will soon open an exciting new, £100 million regeneration and climate education project.

Designed by Harry Holding and Alex Michaelis, this latter exhibit manages to balance perfectly the innovation of a climate-combatting shelter structure - low-carbon, shell-based concrete (’clam-crete’, comprising the by-product shells of the area’s fishing industry), the soothing application of water and truly beautiful plantings (among them striking blue anchusa, samphire and sea thrift).

The Balcony Garden

Among the compact, intricately designed Balcony presentations, Sarah Mayfield and Monika Greenhough’s ‘Hedgerow in the Sky’ garden marries wonderful woodwork with wild, distinctly un-urban plantings. Charred log slices, taken from naturally felled trees (including arboreal victims of ash-dieback disease), provide a water and heat-resistant cladding material, while hedgerow shrubs of hawthorn and hazel have been selected to provide forage for nature within the city.

All About Plants

In this Project Giving Back-sponsored category (sadly the philanthropic funder’s final year of funding gardens for charities), which puts plants at the centre, Charlie Chase’s stunning and diverse planting palette shines through. Designed for youth mental health charity YoungMinds, Chase has brought in unusual and specialist plants from independent plant nurseries, supporting a vital industry, and these intermingle with exquisite naturalism below the characterful bows of weeping cedar trees and southern beeches. And yet the hard structure of Chase’s garden bears an integral message also: all of it has been brought in as waste product: the stepping stone pads are reclaimed offcuts from quarries, the rammed earth walls constructed from waste removed from other garden projects.

In the Great Pavilion

To take a moment’s breather from the show’s bold and ambitious exhibition gardens, wander into the calmer waters of the pavilion to the appealingly modest and gem-glinting stand by Sussex-based nursery Pelham Plants. Here you’ll find low indigos and verbascums, coral geums and, my personal favourite of the entire show, the soft pink yet prominent Nepeta rocemosa ‘Amelia’ — a plant as architectural as it is relaxed.

..and afterwards

Following on the show's recent tradition, Chelsea’s 2026 gardens have been designed to be relocated to new, permanent homes after the show. Even though this is an ambitious prerequisite, it is a vital dimension of the RHS’s sustainability credentials. As such, the mental shift now is towards seeing this grand exhibition as a shop window for future gardens, rather than purely an exhibition for exhibition’s sake. It will be exciting to see how Tom Stuart Smith’s garden for Tate Britain settles into the gallery’s prestigious setting. Similarly, it will be thrilling to admire Anderson’s sculptural hand-rills reappear at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Meanwhile, the other heartening shift this year is seeing designers shouting out the brilliant, essential, quick-paced and creatively delivered work of their construction contractors.

At a time when traditional handicrafts and their associated materials are being championed so fervently, it would be remiss for figurehead designers not to publicly recognise the remarkable skill and dexterity of their workforce. In the lead-up to this year’s show, on social media, there have been pleasing instances of Chelsea designers acknowledging and commending the achievements of their team within the context of their celebratory, end-of-build posts. This, we can hope, lays the foundation for more vital developments in the show’s future.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 runs 19-23 May 2026 at London Gate, Royal Hospital Road, Royal Hospital Chelsea, London, SW3 4SR

Downtown Pittsburgh’s cultural district certainly doesn’t lack things to do, between its 10 performance venues, 50 restaurants, dozens of shops and numerous galleries.

One thing it lacked, however, was substantial green space. The 14-square-block zone contained a number of pocket parks well-suited to briefly contemplate your Mahler or Verdi ticket, but nothing of a scale to quite relax. It’s a deficit newly remedied with the city’s new Arts Landing, a 4.5-acre park intended to accommodate concerts and rotating sculpture installations as well as the simpler pleasures of a lounge on the grass.

The park is the latest development of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, an arts organisation that has doubled as a very savvy real estate developer since the 1980s. Its efforts have played a central role in turning the city’s former red light district into a vibrant cultural cluster. The Trust manages about one million sq ft of real estate in the district, but realised something was missing – namely ‘a space for performing and visual arts activation, moments for recreation and moments for relaxation,’ says the organisation’s president and CEO Kendra Whitlock Ingram.

After acquiring several parcels of land, the Trust tapped the landscape firm Field Operations to reimagine the site as a ‘a green oasis in the heart of downtown,’ according to Ingram.

Lisa Tziona Switkin, a partner at Field Operations explained the firm’s task of accommodating a variety of uses (including the city’s Three Rivers Arts Festival) so that none dominated the one-square-block site. ‘We really wanted to strike a balance of working as an event space but also one where you want to come and sit on the lawn and take in the view,' she says.

The Field Operations team opted to raise the site in its centre; its 5 per cent grade isn’t much in this exceptionally hilly city but it provides a scenographic summit in the middle of its great lawn separating hardscaped spaces along Penn Avenue from the grassy sweep down to a riverside concert pavilion. Switkin explains their aim as crafting ‘small intimate moments that expand to become a bigger moment. You slowly rise up to this high point where you get a glimpse of the river. It was really meant to take what was a one-liner open space and create a series of spaces inside.’

The park was designed to provide a view corridor between Pittsburgh’s downtown and its Allegheny River – one nearly entirely absent previously. ‘The city kind of hugs that. You have a dialogue between the rivers and the city,’ Switkin adds.

The design team also aimed to inject a parcel, as Switkin put it, that was ‘more lush’ than existing downtown pocket parks. Dan Kiley’s Katz Plaza nearby is superb but features only linden trees. Arts Landing by contrast, hosts mixed plantings of red maples, sugar maples, tulip poplars and magnolias and various smaller plants. Stormwater gardens and permeable pathways are integrated nearly unnoticeably into the slightly rolling landscape. Benches of concrete and slatted wood comport to slopes. Fanciful trashcans are painted purple and pink, resembling the shades of the Cultural Trust’s logo.

The playground, meanwhile, is pure fun. Switkin explained, ‘We had an ethos around not using typical playground equipment and picking something more artful. We wanted equipment that was in a way sculpture in itself.’ This aim was easily fulfilled with non-prescriptive play structures from Earthscape Play with titles such as Hexy Wobble Board and Moku Yama.

As befits its name, Arts Landing features plenty of actual art: 23 pieces by 10 artists with links to Pittsburgh. The most prominent of the current sculptural installations is a series of bronzes, Touching the Earth, by revered Pittsburgh-based sculptor Thaddeus Mosley. These were originally commissioned by the Public Art Fund in New York. Mosley died at 99 in March. The exhibition has ended up as fitting tribute, and a full circle moment. Anastasia James, director of galleries and art for the Trust explained, ‘Mosley’s very first exhibition was at the Cultural Trust in the 1950s.’

Such artworks are a welcome addition to Pittsburgh. The city lacked any sort of rotating public art program and this was a step towards remedying that absence–-while also intended to provide a literal pedestal for talent. ‘I saw it as an opportunity to commission works by artists to take the next step in their career,' James says.

The Cultural Trust had relationships with some of the artists they selected, others were new collaborators. Some were deliberately commissioned for works outside of their speciality. The artist Shikeith, for example, has principally been known as a photographer, his iron, glass, and neon piece is his first public art commission. Mikael Owunna and Marques Redd’s This is the Body of the Sun depicts the solar god Ra. Vanessa German crafted artful and useful bright benches featuring the handprints of centenarians – including Mosley.

The Trust also made efforts to incorporate works by disabled artists. Darian Johnson crafted several local animal sculptures, including a whimsical raccoon, snail and a black bear. James said, ‘One day he made these little animals, and he wrote a note that said, 'Show Anastasia'. I said, “we have to make these”.’

The sculptures will soon be joined by the world’s first artist-designed pickleball court. Sharmistha Ray drew on cosmological imagery, Steelers team colors and historic life-sized Mughal Parcheesi boards in crafting its design.

One work was designed with wildlife in mind. Lenka Clayton and Philip Andrew Lewis’ Bird Circus is a series of big top-inspired poles designed to attract winged creatures. 'Pittsburgh’s along a major migratory corridor,’ says Clayton. ‘We thought, let's make sculptures that welcome the birds.’

Turns out Arts Landing is a resting place not just for humans but any creature that cares to sit down.

The work of landscape architect Walter Hood embodies values – truth, empathy, inclusion – that are being sorely tested as the US celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. His spaces demonstrate that public ground can be common ground, capable of holding conflict and comfort in the same frame.

Enter the world of landscape architect Walter Hood

Born in 1958 and raised in a segregated part of Charlotte, North Carolina, Hood became the first person in his family to attend college. He joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993, just four years after earning two master's degrees there, in architecture and landscape architecture. Since founding Hood Design Studio out of his West Oakland apartment in 1992, he has spent decades reframing our experience of public spaces, including Manhattan's Lincoln Center (in progress), the Broad Museum in LA, and Macon Yards in Georgia. He has transformed traffic islands, vacant plots and underpasses, translating the complexities of overlooked communities and contested sites into enriching communal hubs.

Early on in his career, as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Hood observed archaeological excavations. ‘That remains a fixture in my thinking about how the past is represented,' he says. ‘I wish we had more ruins in this country. Without the ruin, you have to develop a language that can speak to what is underfoot.' Each of his gardens, community spaces, streetscapes and masterplans finds its own voice through a blend of history, ecology, art and culture. Instead of erasing what existed before, Hood recovers forgotten histories, represents the particularities of place and makes marginalised people visible.

He has, in fact, been designing the ruins of the future. The 2005 de Young Museum in San Francisco is an enduring manifesto of his methods. Rather than framing the Herzog & de Meuron building in a polite carpet of planting, he treated the gardens and interstitial spaces as urban archaeology. He evoked the site's original sand dunes in undulating ground planes and informal paths, while folding historic palm trees and fragments of earlier museum statuary into a highly textural, high-contrast terrain. A lush, living garment, it juxtaposes the cultivated and the wild, creates moments of contemplation and discovery and acknowledges the city's layered past.

Hood's emphasis on the past, however, is not about looking back. It's about beginning the creative process by memorialising what others have preferred to forget. If the de Young is a meditation on place, his 2023 design for the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, is a reckoning. Located at Gadsden's Wharf, the main port of entry to the US for more than 40 per cent of enslaved Africans, it navigates the haunting space between atrocity and tourism. Hood marks presence and absence, making visible what the city has long buried under housing developments and parkland.

It follows a path of ‘provocative abstractions': its piers, allées and ethnobotanical plants native to Africa are not picturesque gestures but spatial narratives, inviting visitors to reorient themselves to this place and its shattering past. Rising and falling with the tide, a shallow pool obscures and exposes images cast in local stone. They depict an abolitionist diagram of the slave ship Brookes and its closely packed human cargo, with the ebb and flow of water allowing visitors to interpret what they're seeing in a variety of ways.

For almost 200 years, difference did not prevail at the University of Virginia's Academical Village. Designed by founding father Thomas Jefferson, its rational, neoclassical plan erased the lives of the enslaved people who built it. Hood's insertions, rather than mimicking or defying that symmetry, form a palimpsest. Subtle shifts in paving, planting and carefully placed gathering spaces coax the eye away from the too-tidy axis of the lawn toward its margins, where other stories reside. The design fleshes out a landscape of omissions, one that was scripted as singular and heroic but was never entirely true.

Grounded in research, Hood's practice is an expansive act of looking and listening to local voices, environmental histories, cartography, geography and geology, cultural memory and anthropology. Each site is layered, sometimes shackled, with stories, but never a blank canvas. Hood's landscapes excavate, rather than pave over, the social and political conditions that shaped them. What unites his projects is not a signature aesthetic but the nature of the conversations they have with the site's ancestors and its future users. ‘I want my work to talk to dead people, but I don't want to just restore what was there,' Hood says. ‘If you're just restoring it, you're stuck.'

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Piet Oudolf is a rarity in the ever-evolving world of landscape design, in which few leading lights come close to household recognition. Garden designer Oudolf is not only venerated but has become shorthand for an entire landscape aesthetic: of bold perennial plantings and dynamic textures, and great drifts of gently shifting colour.

Who is Piet Oudolf?

Internationally celebrated for commissions in public parks, botanical gardens and cultural institutions alike, Piet Oudolf (b. 1944) is a Dutch designer whose work is both instant and instantly recognisable, combining cultivated elegance with the transportive drama of the wild meadow – as seen at New York’s High Line, Chicago’s Lurie Garden and RHS Wisley, to name just a few.

Piet Oudolf: the beginnings

As with all revered masters whose body of work bears a measure of idiosyncrasy, it is easy to forget the pioneering vision and enterprising experimentation that preceded the acclaim. Back in the 1980s, spurred by a lack of diversity in commercially available plant material, Oudolf began trialling different species at his home in Hummelo, Netherlands, taking inspiration from natural landscapes and plant communities - most notably the vast, perennial-rich grasslands of North America.

Developing a specialist plant nursery at the garden with horticulturist Romke van de Kaa – which, up until its closure to the public in 2010, was a place of pilgrimage for many gardeners – Oudolf developed an approach to planting design which championed ornamental grasses, integrating them with bold brushstrokes of perennial species including the likes of vibrant echinacea, amsonia and persicaria.

Alongside a handful of other pioneering Dutch gardeners such as Henk Gerritsen and Ton ter Linden, he became a leading figure in what would later be dubbed the ‘New Perennial movement’, one of the most influential styles in the history of garden design, and one that has continued to evolve ever since.

Signature style: the New Perennial movement

At its heart, the New Perennial movement is a naturalistic planting style underpinned by an appreciation and deep understanding of the full lifecycle of a herbaceous perennial plant (which regrows from the ground every year), from emerging green shoot through spring and summer colour to faded bloom and brittle winter seed-head.

Rather than designing gardens to be enjoyed only at peak times of the year, Oudolf and his peers embraced the dynamism that comes with seasonal change, conceiving planting schemes that, much like wild, natural perennial meadows, morph across the year. Most strikingly, the movement embraced the beauty of senescence – plants in natural decay, which Oudolf considers a ‘fifth’ season. Indeed, the plantsman once remarked that flora is only worth growing if it looks good when it is dead.

Month by month, the character of an Oudolf garden transitions as different species flare and fade: contrasting textures and structural forms carry the eye across the planted canvas, while literal movement is drawn from the air in the flutter of grasses in the breeze. By the early 2000s, this impactful approach had been adopted by many influential European and North American garden designers, and the employment of grasses as a unifying ‘matrix’ for a planting scheme – notably varieties of North American switchgrass, bluestem and deschampsia – was increasingly popularised.

A landmark moment: the High Line, New York

One of Piet Oudolf’s most distinctive attributes as a practitioner is his straddling of the horticultural and art worlds. From his rhythmic, ‘painterly’ planting schemes to the much-revered hand-coloured plans that accompany his work, Oudolf’s approach to landscape design has the rare quality of being regarded as an art form.

This has no doubt contributed to his frequent patronage by galleries, museums and cultural institutions, from London’s Serpentine and Somerset’s Hauser & Wirth galleries to the Spanish sculpture garden Chillida Leku (indeed, his drawn designs often feature in gallery catalogues and are sold as framed prints). The landscape Oudolf is most prominently associated with, however, is undoubtedly New York’s High Line, a 1.4-mile-long, raised public walkway crammed with engaging, dynamic plantings.

Formerly a disused railway leading from the Meatpacking District through the west Manhattan neighbourhoods of Chelsea and Hudson Yards, the High Line was transformed into a vibrant urban park by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with James Corner Field Operations and Piet Oudolf.

Oudolf was commissioned by the Friends of the High Line and the City of New York to make a garden of multiple zones and atmospheres. Taking inspiration from the wild plants that had naturally colonised the deserted tracks – many of them North American natives – Oudolf’s design ranges from a dappled birch grove to areas of wetland, sunny meadow and grassland-inspired matrix plantings. First opened in 2009, and now one of the city’s most popular attractions, the park is considered a major achievement in urban greening, and a rare example of high-design horticulture in the public realm.

Career development

As in all creative disciplines, Oudolf’s practice has developed and refined over the years, with the bold block-plantings of his early career structurally loosening and often softened through the use of lighter, more airy grasses and perennials. Continued observation of wild landscapes has driven his aesthetic evermore in the direction of the ‘naturalistic’ perennial meadow, which is perhaps best exemplified in his revised work at RHS Wisley in Surrey.

Here, Oudolf’s original design for Wisley’s glasshouse borders – implemented at the turn of the millennium – took the form of a wide lawn path dividing two large sections of perennial planting. Remodelled and reopened last year, the borders now envelop the visitor fully, as they follow snaking, looping pathways that facilitate a more immersive experience amongst the plants. The new design features almost three times as many plant varieties as the original garden, selected as much for sustainable climate resilience as their multi-seasonal beauty.

11 key works

Hummelo, Netherlands (1982-present)

Though the garden at Oudolf’s home and studio in Hummelo, Netherlands, no longer houses his once revered plant nursery, it remains the designer’s showpiece landscape, and experimental ground for new ideas and planting compositions.

The Battery Bosque, New York (2002)

Oudolf’s masterplan for the gardens of Manhattan Island’s popular, 25-acre Battery waterfront park – which offers views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island – features areas of contrasting plantings, from shady woodland, sunny bikeway and broad perennial garden schemes.

The Lurie Garden, Chicago (2004)

Featuring many native North American prairie plant species, downtown Chicago’s three-acre Lurie Garden – Oudolf’s first commissioned garden in the USA, designed in partnership with landscape architecture firm GGN – reconnects the city with the surrounding Midwestern grasslands: a place of urban greening shared by people, pollinators and rare plants.

Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2014)

At the Somerset Gallery outside Bruton, Oudolf converted a former agricultural field into a living artwork. An intoxicating mix of richly coloured perennials and grasses, the ‘Oudolf Field’ draws visitors along curving lawn pathways towards the Radić Pavilion, designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić (and originally commissioned as the 2014 Serpentine Pavilion).

RHS Wisley, Surrey (2021-2024)

Having first designed the glasshouse borders at RHS Wisley in 2001, Oudolf’s new 2024 design immerses visitors within naturalistic perennial plantings via a snaking, rather than linear, footpath.

Oudolf Garden Detroit, Michigan (2021)

Situated on Detroit’s Belle Isle state park, opposite downtown, this three-acre public garden is entirely volunteer-run, channelling the city’s urban-greening, grassroots vitality.

Serpentine Pavilion planting, London (2011)

In providing an isolated strip of planting at the heart of Peter Zumthor’s Serpentine Pavilion of 2011, Oudolf put plants centre-stage. The rare, contemplative setting of Zumthor’s structure, and its inward-facing periphery seating, allowed visitors to pause and experience the magic of Oudolf’s seasonally-shifting palette of perennials, which included carmine-coloured eupatorium, dark-leafed actaea and scarlet monarda.

Chillida Leku, San Sabastian (2019)

Welcoming visitors to Chillida Leku – a museum and sculpture garden outside San Sebastian dedicated to the work of Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida – is Oudolf’s perennial border: a gently mounded exhibition of brilliant herbaceous colour. Here, the resulting seed heads of pink echinacea and bold blue globe-thistle are left standing, providing winter structure.

Maggie’s, Royal Marsden Hospital, London (2019)

At Maggie’s Royal Marsden, Oudolf’s interconnected zonal plantings are designed to make productive use of a tricky site with varying light levels, and offer a soothing setting for visiting patients. The garden’s 12,000 plants fill out across areas of shade, dappled light and full sun, with ornamental grasses knitting the space together.

Vitra Campus Garden, Germany (2021)

In 2021, renowned Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf created a lush 4,000 sq m perennial garden for Vitra, bringing a touch of nature to the company's headquarters in the southern German town of Weil am Rhein. Its opening could not have been more perfectly timed: having endured long stretches of domestic confinement in the preceding year because of the Covid pandemic, visitors craved gardens, fresh air, and horizons afforded by wide open spaces.

Vandalorum, Sweden (2025)

Among Oudolf’s most recent projects is the garden masterplan for the Vandalorum Museum of Art and Design in Värnamo, Sweden. Completed in 2025 and designed to be truly immersive, the eight-hectare site features a perennial meadow courtyard set out in ‘bowl’ shape with meandering walkways, providing space for reflection, respite and outdoor education activities.

oudolf.com

As a cancer care facility, the Maggie’s model is simple yet quite brilliant: a place of respite, solace and practical support facilitated by considered spacial design and the engaging, grounding seasonality of an immersive garden. Situated within hospital grounds, they are a welcoming place for anyone affected by cancer; somewhere to turn directly after a diagnosis, during treatment, remission, and thereafter.

Maggie’s: a brief history

That such a centre now exists within over 27 major hospital sites across the UK and abroad is the legacy of writer, gardener and designer Maggie Keswick Jencks. Diagnosed with breast cancer at 47, and having experienced firsthand the complexities of cancer care, Maggie felt that more support could be offered, beyond medical treatment, to those living with cancer – a place in contrast to the often windowless sterility of a hospital consultancy room or corridor.

Before she died in 1995, Maggie, together with her husband, the landscape designer Charles Jencks, and her oncology nurse Dame Laura Lee LBE (who would become the charity’s Chief Executive), conceived the template for a different kind of healthcare premises, and the first Maggie’s opened its doors just a year later at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh.

The Maggie's centres and their architecture

‘In essence, Maggie’s is somewhere you can go as soon as you leave the consultant’s office’, explains Director of Properties, Siobhan Wyatt. ‘Our centres are run by oncology professionals and we provide practical, social and emotional support – we have benefits advisers, clinical psychologists and cancer support specialists, but also run things like art classes, relax and breathe sessions and offer nutritional support; it can be as little or as much as the visitor needs’.

Architecturally, Maggie’s buildings are atypical in their design, with leading architects such as Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid conceiving mixed-use spaces that promote human connectedness and wellbeing, where patients, carers and healthcare professionals can intermingle in buildings emanating a sense of sanctuary. The enveloping gardens at Maggie’s sites are every bit as integral to this outcome.

Maggie's gardens

‘When you are in a Maggie’s, and when you’re digesting information, the view beyond the window to the outside world is really important’, says Wyatt, emphasising the significance of seasonality that gardens impart. ‘If you’re sat in an environment where you are surrounded by seasons it can help you psychologically adjust: you see the beauty in a shrub coming to a natural end in autumn and then the regrowth in spring, for example. All of that, without saying anything out loud, supports the process of you accommodating this new world that you’re living in’.

Initially, interest in designing Maggie’s gardens came from Maggie and Charles’ circle of friends, Wyatt explains, which included landscape architects who offered their services. ‘But it soon became more structured. We’re very invested in matching the architect and landscape designer for each project, making sure the fit is right.

Maggie's gardens: key examples

At Maggie’s Southampton, for example, the architect was Amanda Levete and Sarah Price was the landscape designer, and there was 'a really beautiful relationship in their sharing of space,’ says Wyatt. The centre, which occupies a former car park within University Hospital Southampton, was designed to reflect the surrounding New Forest landscape. Wyatt continues: ‘Amanda Lavette was completely generous: the concept was a glazed box with little architectural definition, just surrounded by a slice of the New Forest. The landscape then banks up all the way around on all four sides, so you are nestled in.'

Wyatt gives the example, too, of how Marie-Louise Agius worked with Thomas Heatherwick on a ‘planters’-theme for Maggie’s Yorkshire, with raised roofs of verdant greenery; and of Maggie’s Northampton – a more recent project – where garden designer Arne Maynard has continued the indoor-outdoor architecture of Stephen Marshall’s ‘umbrella’ building with linear hedges that form outside rooms. Undoubtedly, the collaborative process yields hugely creative results. ‘Every time you do one of these projects, you learn that the relationship between architect and landscape architect is really important,’ says Wyatt.

By its nature, the space made available on hospital grounds for Maggie’s centres often tends to be awkward: a former carpark, a space between existing buildings, an inclined landscape, etc. Nonetheless, over the years, designers have risen to such challenges with remarkable ingenuity and beauty. At the Royal Marsden hospital in London, renowned Dutch designer Piet Oudolf envisioned four zones of differing plant communities to make productive use of varying light levels, its 12,000 plants selected for year-round seasonality.

At the Royal Oldham Hospital, garden designer Rupert Muldoon employed airy white birch trees to draw light into a garden space below dRMM’s column-raised Maggie’s building. ‘Designing a healing garden, for me, meant embracing as much nature as possible,’ Muldoon reflects. ‘I imagined a woodland garden of suggestive routes, inviting exploration. Working with Maggie’s is liberating – there is freedom to create what you are most passionate about.’

Wyatt remarks on a favourite space within the garden at Maggie’s Manchester, designed by Dan Pearson, which features raised beds for vegetable cultivation. ‘There’s a lot of activity – people having conversations over doing something practical with their hands, like shelling peas; that’s always magical to see. There’s a covered veranda, and you see people asleep in chairs with a sheepskin blanket over them – it might be raining, but they can still be outside’. Vital to all Maggie’s gardens is a carefully selected, highly skilled gardener, who continues the designer’s vision but also develops its unique character, often leading a regular group of volunteers in practical, accessible gardening activities.

In many cases, the gardens play a crucial role in softening the passage between the hospital consultancy room and the Maggie’s premises, particularly for patients immediately after diagnosis, Wyatt explains – something Maggie felt keenly. ‘As soon as you get out, the way-finding and the time it takes to get to the centre is really important. That’s why we insist on being as near to oncology as we can, and we insist on influencing as much of that surrounding landscape as we can’.

A good example can be seen in the extended garden at Maggie’s West London, where Dan Pearson conceived an intimate pathway weaving below the hospital’s large London plane trees, leading through lush seasonal planting – including scented sweet box, soft hellebores and Japanese anemones – to the centre itself. ‘Those meandering spaces give a person time to pause, time to digest; spaces where you can sit down, where you feel comforted and secure, before you get to the front door. That’s why the garden is so important – it’s that transition from the medical to the Maggie’s environment.’

Recommended: The Garden Design Confessional podcast. Presented by garden designer Darren Hawkes, the podcast features interviews with many of the garden designers behind Maggie’s gardens.

maggies.org

Landscape architect Kongjian Yu (1963-2025) has died in an aeroplane accident, it's been announced. The renowned Chinese design professional was working on a project in south-western Brazil when the small vessel he was in crashed.

Kongjian Yu: the landscape architect and founder of Turenscape

Kongjian Yu was a respected member of the global landscape architecture community – and a pioneering specialist in his country, China, and beyond. He was the 2023 recipient of the prestigious Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize – the biennial accolade designed by Washington-based The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) to raise awareness of and celebrate excellence in its field, as well as commemorate renowned Canadian landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who died in 2021.

The landscape architect headed the field-leading firm Turenscape, and his growing portfolio included the seminal 'sponge cities' model and campaign. This sought to address urban flooding caused by climate change, and it was so influential that it was adopted as national policy in China in 2013.

Yu was also the founder and leader of the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture and the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Peking University.

'Kongjian Yu was the global champion of the “sponge cities” concept, a global ambassador for the profession of landscape architecture, and a global advocate for addressing the effects of climate change,' said Charles A Birnbaum, president and CEO of TCLF.

'Only two years ago, he was awarded the biennial Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, which is bestowed on a recipient who is “exceptionally talented, creative, courageous, and visionary". The Oberlander Prize Jury Citation [called him] a “brilliant and prolific designer … [who] is also a force for progressive change in landscape architecture around the world”,’ continued Birnbaum.

Meanwhile, Gary Hilderbrand, chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, said at the time of Yu's Oberlander Prize win that he was the ‘all-time greatest spokesperson for landscape architecture in China – a nation that needs environmental rescue on a colossal scale’.

Landscape architect Bas Smets is currently collaborating on a book with Emanuele Coccia, a lecturer at the French research institute EHESS. The Italian-born philosopher’s work centres on ideas of landscape and our connection to nature; his own 2018 book, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, was innovative in talking about the fundamental role of flora in our relationship with the world.

We met with Smets and Coccia to discuss landscape, its meaning and potential.

Emanuele Coccia and Bas Smets discuss

Wallpaper*: How did you two meet?

Bas Smets: I was in [artist] Philippe Parreno’s studio in Paris, and he told me, ‘You really have to read this book, The Life of Plants.’ I invited Emanuele to be in conversation at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, where we had an exhibition in 2018. [Before the event] I took his book to the Boboli Gardens in Florence, and I had an afternoon to myself, underlining passages from it to form questions for our conversation.

Emanuele Coccia: That was the first time we actually met, but it is important to say that we also saw each other in a bar later, and then had dinner and a longer conversation. But we met because of Philippe, who is a very close friend of both of us.

W* Emanuele, can you explain about your connection to landscape?

EC: When I was young, I had agricultural training, which led me to work a lot with topics around ecology and biology. As a child, I wished I could become an architect, but I knew I couldn’t draw. So if you put together those two elements, you arrive at landscape architecture. I quickly realised, when I started to study ecology, that the word ‘ecologist’ should be replaced by ‘landscape architect’, because what we need is new landscape architecture and not just ecology. One of the biggest problems with ecological thinking today is the separation of human and non-human. Whenever we encounter a problem in ecology, we think the solution is to leave non-humans alone. What we have to do is form a good relationship with the rest of the species.

W*: So it’s about symbiosis?

EC: Not just symbiosis. It’s also about forming space for us to live together. This is a good definition of landscape. Ecology often thinks of the relationship between humans and non-humans in terms of allotment gardens: everyone must have their own space and stay where they are, otherwise they become an invasive species. Landscape architecture, on the other hand, is the discipline that manages to find a way for as many species as possible to coexist in a single territory. There are very few practitioners who are aware of that, and Bas is one of them, which is why we immediately connected.

BS: I agree. I got into landscaping as I have always asked the philosophical question: how to live on this planet? We have all these life forms, how do we share this planet? Landscaping for me is not decorative. It’s a systemic question. [French philosopher] Alain Roger wrote, ‘land becomes a landscape’. Landscape is an act of organising natural elements. It is linked to actions that change the biosphere in which we live. Ultimately, it is about biospheric thinking.

W*: It sounds like the definition of landscape has changed over time.

BS: We live in a time of crisis. Biospheric thinking is using landscape projects to make climates, understand climates and organise microclimates, to find solutions to climate challenges. Landscape has come a long way from garden design. Hopefully, it helps us make cities more resilient to climate change.

EC: Still, there is an embarrassingly low bar on our understanding of landscape, in comparison to architecture, where we have produced a huge amount of theoretical thinking over time. Very few landscape architects are writing; Bas is one of them. As a result, the canon is incredibly biased and limited. There are no publications talking about exciting landscape projects happening in different parts of the world. Schools need to make landscape architecture a bigger discipline. This is a huge cultural tragedy. It is a problem of training and a lack of awareness.

BS: Emanuele and I often say we need to start a publishing house for landscape architecture books. I started teaching at Harvard three years ago. Landscape architecture is a difficult thing to teach; you need a basic knowledge of many things, such as pedology, geology, ecology, hydrology, meteorology and architecture. It is not a field you can learn in five years. Working with living material is incredibly complex; you need experience and to develop intuition. Another thing is that landscape architecture has been neglected for many years by both architects and artists. So it’s not only difficult to become a good landscape architect, but you are also not looked at in the right way. What we can do is territorial transformation, like [in designing the Luma Foundation’s Parc des Ateliers] in Arles, where we made profound changes with the help of plants. Plants are our agents.

EC: Even from a legal point of view, it implies a change in the way we do contracts, as with landscape architecture, when the building project ends is when the landscape one begins. It can last up to ten or 20 years.

BS: There is this interesting theory that landscaping changed its status after the Second World War. Before the war, the modernist movement considered landscape an essential part of its social programme and valued the importance of being outside. After the war, with the necessity to build a large amount of housing in a very short time, suddenly all the attention went to building, and landscaping became an afterthought. That is not too long ago.

EC: The problem is that now, having a roof over your head is not enough. Cities today are dying because they were not built in a way that frames the entire landscape, but only think about the human elements. We need to rewrite the theory of the city and transform it into a theory of the new planet. Every city must become a kind of interspecies magnet, a place where the entire planet conspires to breathe better. It is a task that landscape architecture should take on.

BS: I think landscape architecture is, by definition, a collective intelligence. It’s biospheric science, everything is linked.

W*: Landscape is linked to the climate crisis, wellness and a sense of place. What is the most urgent problem for landscape architects to tackle for the future?

BS: With my students, I don’t ask them to find an answer to something; I ask them to pose a question. We present a city and ask them, ‘What is the most urgent thing to do?’ This way, they learn to define the problem before formulating a response.

EC: As most of us live in cities, we need to rethink them. We need to invent forms and structures that allow nature to live within a city. And we need to look at landscape architecture as an artistic space. Landscape architecture is the queen of science because it helps us to consider nature as one of the biggest forms of art on the planet.

W*: Does this reframing include some way of ‘healing’ nature and our planet?

BS: Landscaping is not about repair. We are part of a larger ecosystem, and instead of trying to impose ourselves on it, we need to figure out how to live with it differently. It is about understanding its systemic value. For example, we transformed a former desert [the park in Arles] into an incredible space where lots of species now thrive.

W*: Is it an equal relationship between humans and other living things? We can manipulate the environment, but then we also have climate change, nature’s reaction. Where does the landscape architect’s responsibility lie in terms of managing this relationship?

EC: I am just a scholar, but I would say that we have to avoid formulating the question in purely moral terms because this way we are giving too much power to humanity, who don’t have this power, and we’re turning problems into a question of guilt and merit. For example, we know now that the Amazonian rainforest has been inhabited by many populations and has been largely shaped by these populations. Unlike what we used to think, this is an urban artefact, including lots of settlements. They didn’t ask themselves what their responsibilities were, but they created a space that’s more biodiverse than it was before, the most biodiverse on the planet. That is the power of landscape architecture, and we need to study it.

BS: It’s like being a caretaker. As Buckminster Fuller said, we are on the planet Spaceship Earth. It’s about making things better, and current conditions are never final.

W*: Is there something that makes you feel optimistic about the future in the field?

EC: That there are people like Bas, new figures, and intellectuals in landscape architecture is fantastic. This didn’t exist 40 or 50 years ago. They are reshaping the discipline.

BS: For me, it’s projects like Arles: the moment you bring back a systemic approach, when you bring back soil, water, plants and are reenacting the appearance of life on earth. We brought water, then plants, and now animal life is coming back by itself. We tried to make calculations, of course, but we never expected wildlife would come back so fast and so furiously. We have 55 new species of birds, 20 of which are nesting here. The moment you tap into the life force, the regeneration is much faster than anything we could ever make as a human species. It is a clear sign of hope.

Find out more about Bas Smets in our profile, and meet some of the world's most exciting landscape architects in the Wallpaper* Landscape Architects’ Directory 2025

This article appears in the October 2025 Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

You might expect a landscape architect to put plants at the heart of their universe. In a sense, Bas Smets, one of the industry’s pioneering thinkers, does that, too, but it’s the triptych of philosophy, art and science that forms his true north star.

Perhaps it’s because landscapes are ever-changing – their very idea evolving over time and history – but also, as nature is alive and therefore a moving target, it physically morphs into something different every day. ‘You need to understand a site and work with it, and realise that it is not in a state of “being”, but it’s in a constant state of “becoming”,’ the Belgian landscape architect says. In this fluid and dynamic condition, references are needed, and while you might not immediately associate these three areas of culture and knowledge with landscape, to Smets, they are intrinsically linked.

Explore the world of landscape architect Bas Smets

‘Landscape is a philosophy,’ he says. ‘It’s about understanding how to live on this planet. What is more philosophical than that? French philosopher Alain Roger said the land, the phase zero of a site, becomes a landscape through an artistic intervention, so art plays a key role here, too. In fact, the first recording of the use of the word “landscape” was by the painters from the Low Countries in the 16th century – it’s borrowed from the Dutch word “landschap”, which was first used to speak about a new genre in painting.’

Landscape is, above all, a mental construction, a way of organising the elements of the ‘land’. It is a concept that Smets has elaborated on and researched extensively for publications and exhibitions, including curating shows in 2016 and 2019 in Brussels’ Bozar art centre on both the history of notions of landscape and landscape within painting (in particular, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work).

The science behind nature and how plants and all living things work, alone and together, is the third axis in Smets’ thinking. ‘Darwin contended that the environment does not shape the plants, but the plants shape the environment. Landscaping is setting in motion something that then continues to transform the space. You are hacking into an algorithm and into that logic. At the same time, the landscape is cyclical; it is about transformation.’

For Smets, working with a site’s natural environment to design a new landscape involves intense measuring and a deep comprehension of what is there, and what can be, in terms of biology, meteorology, geology and a host of other scientific fields, before even getting close to hatching a plan.

This quest for understanding, and an inherent curiosity, have always been a part of Smets’ thinking. He had a peripatetic childhood in Congo and Algeria (his mother worked for non-profits and his father was a civil engineer), before returning to Belgium to live on the outskirts of Brussels. As a young adult, he lived in Leuven and Geneva, where he studied engineering and architecture, and landscape architecture, respectively; and in Oregon, where he spent a year as an exchange student. ‘It was my first encounter with true wilderness and outdoor living,’ he recalls.

As a landscape professional, he’s lived in Brussels, Paris and Arles, following his projects, while he regularly commutes to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for four months each year, teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. These travels often inspired questions about life on our planet, prompted by different settings and human behaviours within them. While drawn to philosophy and mathematics as a young adult, he realised during his time at KU Leuven that what he enjoyed most was not designing the buildings, but everything else around them. He turned to landscape architecture and has never looked back.

Spending six years in Paris, he worked for the office of landscape architect Michel Desvigne before setting up his studio in his living room in Brussels in 2007. A year later, he was joined by architect Eliane Le Roux, now his partner and associate, who serves as the studio’s creative director (as well as the lead of her own design atelier; she has worked on catwalk designs for Maison Margiela, among other fashion brands).

Le Roux’s artistic consultation and detail-orientated approach have guided the majority of the practice’s product output – from benches and other outdoor furniture to material compositions, fashion accessories, merchandise, and the studio’s brand identity, helping to glue it all together. ‘I don’t have a look, I have a methodology,’ says Smets – yet through Le Roux’s diligent eye, everything, from website design to project expressions, leaves the impression of a truly cohesive creative body of work. ‘It brings a whole new depth of thought, adding a layer of refinement to the landscape project,’ says Le Roux.

One of Smets’ first commissions was for a small private garden. His client, Swiss art patron and businesswoman Maja Hoffmann, wanted a design for her central London home’s neglected courtyard. Titled the ‘Sunken Garden’ and completed in 2011, the project became Smets’ first application of microclimate analysis. Realising that the space was consistently two to three degrees warmer than its surrounding environment, due to its enclosed nature, Smets tapped into this temperature potential, bringing in Tasmanian giant ferns and Yorkstone rocks, and transforming the relatively small patch of land, surrounded by tall façades, into a lush, leafy, almost otherworldly retreat.

‘I thought, I want to make the last prehistoric garden of London! Fern is one of the oldest plant species on the planet,’ he says. ‘I like to understand a climate, record it, respond to it and then change it. With this project, because of its enclosed nature, I realised there was the possibility of creating a microclimate using the right plants. Plants are an agent of change and transformation.’

Smets’ approach expands to fictional landscapes, too. A piece he worked on with artist Philippe Parreno allowed him to imagine an entire environment from scratch. The project, a film titled Continuously Habitable Zones, made for a Fondation Beyeler show in Switzerland in 2010, involved creating a black garden on an imaginary planet set in a world of several suns. It was constructed in Portugal, and the result features an almost desert-like terrain made of a diamond dust ‘river’ and black plants (his research found that, due to the particularities of the light frequencies in such an environment, planting wouldn’t be green). ‘It was interesting, as it took this idea of inventing a landscape to a whole new level,’ he says.

Creating worlds and transforming landscapes sounds powerful, but moves such as these come with restrictions: how much are we meant to tweak and tinker with the natural world? ‘Plants move, all life moves, even continents move, but we don’t have to be naive about it,’ notes Smets, highlighting the need for a scientific approach and calculated steps. ‘The idea of indigenous plants was invented in the 18th century, which was a very peculiar moment in history. It was about putting categories on animals, people and plants; this one is from here, and that one is not. The reality is that nature has never cared about that. In today’s climate crisis, we have to think about the force of plants, their capacity, and look at them as an opportunity.’

In this context, Smets’ take on the use of science in landscaping is not about dominating the environment, but about understanding it. ‘Our knowledge of how plants work is fairly recent,’ he says. ‘They’re intelligent in the sense that they make choices. I always look at what the vocation of a site dictates, and that is what drives the project.’

This dynamism is one of the reasons why he prefers to keep in touch with projects far beyond what’s often seen as the completion date. Ideally, he’d like to follow up with work at least two years post-completion, measuring, tweaking, supporting and adjusting as necessary.

This thinking became an integral part of the studio and is regularly used in Smets’ projects, such as in the hanging gardens at the Mandrake hotel in London in 2017; creating 17 public plazas with Office KGDVS, crafting greenery and shading across Bahrain’s historical Pearling Path; planting in La Défense in Paris in 2020, where groves of alder trees protect the ground level’s open, public spaces from excessive wind by creating an urban forest; and the 2024 reimagining of the Baumanière Les Baux-de-Provence hotel and restaurant gardens in the south of France. His biggest ‘experiment’, however, is the Luma Foundation’s Parc des Ateliers in Arles, in Provence.

The site, an abandoned railway yard that had become an industrial wasteland, was given a new lease of life in 2014, when Maja Hoffmann began transforming it into a vibrant art campus. One by one, its existing warehouse structures were reimagined for art displays, residences and research (the list of collaborating architects includes Frank Gehry, Annabelle Selldorf, BC Architects and Assemble). Importantly, with Smets’ help, the campus’ outdoor areas, formerly a desert-like terrain where nothing grew, were completely revived into a lush and richly biodiverse ecosystem.

According to Smets, crafting the park in Arles was almost like mimicking the appearance of life on the planet as it came out of a body of water. He worked with a range of specialists, from botanists to climate engineers and pedologists, to bring back biodiversity, and he ‘tried to imagine what nature would have done’, activating the land in stages, bringing earth, water and plants (more than 140 species and some 80,000 trees, shrubs and flowers) in calculated succession so they could mesh and feed off each other’s success. Wildlife followed effortlessly, and now 55 new species of birds frequent the park, which is also home to small animals, such as earthworms, frogs and hedgehogs.

If these gardens looked enticing when the project opened its doors to the public in 2021, they are positively thriving now, as Smets returned to Arles this summer to launch an exhibition on his studio’s work. A minimalist and immersive yet incredibly layered display, it tells the story of Smets’ pioneering thinking and, through examples of ongoing projects, showcases how carefully injected urban ecologies can transform our relationship with the environment (one that is currently in crisis, as the entrance canopy, decked with a climate stripe graph that shows the earth’s rising temperatures to this day, demonstrates). The Luma shop now stocks hats and bags designed by Le Roux to mark the exhibition and spread awareness for the landscape experience beyond the foundation’s borders.

More experiments include ongoing projects in Antwerp, where he is currently designing a riverside park that draws on the city’s old canal system to create a dyke against rising sea levels, and research works, from his leading of the Belgian participation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, where the country’s pavilion becomes a ‘living’ laboratory that shows how plants can be leveraged to alter indoor climate, to the work at his Harvard studio, titled ‘Biospheric Urbanism’. The latter’s intense analysis led to the proposal to create artificial microclimates by boosting Athens’ green infrastructure, for example, by temporarily planting secondary archaeological sites to bring the nature-deprived Greek capital’s temperature down using the power of plants.

The redesign of the surroundings of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral following the devastating 2019 fire is, no doubt, his most high-profile upcoming project. For his 2021 international competition-winning scheme, Smets used the same climatic approach to create an ‘augmented landscape’ around the monument. His terrain and climate analysis aimed to tap into nature’s forces to not only slow down overheating but significantly lower perceived urban temperatures around the Île de la Cité in the Seine. Working with architecture studios Grau and NGA, Smets completely reimagined views, routes and levels on the land mass.

An abandoned car park beneath the cathedral will be transformed into a visitor centre, offering views of the foundations as seen 800 years ago, when the cathedral was first built and before soil sediments and construction raised the ground to its current level. An open plaza, paved with striated Burgundy stone slabs, will be covered with a thin film of water daily, not enough to get shoes wet but just enough to freshen the surroundings naturally through evaporative cooling. (The striation was Le Roux’s idea and not only creates an optical illusion by visually extending the floor pattern inside the cathedral, but also enhances the surface’s anti-slip properties.) Meanwhile, a redesigned green park, complete with more than 165 new trees, as well as a rethought surrounding road system, will turn this part of central Paris into a mini green paradise.

A first phase, the small plaza directly outside the cathedral’s entrance, was completed in 2024, marking the monument’s reopening. While works on the wider site will continue until 2028, this element offers a glimpse into the future – one that Smets is hopeful landscape will play a key role in, as our environment, natural and human-made, is inescapably present and therefore ever-more critical, both in terms of our wellbeing and the very survival of our planet. As he highlighted at the opening of his show in Arles in July 2025, ‘we are always surrounded by landscape’.

‘Bas Smets: Climates of Landscape’ is on show until 2 November at Le Magasin Électrique at the Luma Foundation, Arles, luma.org, bassmets.be

This year, a deep dive into landscape architecture brings a refreshing shift to the long-standing Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory, an annual listing of promising practices across the globe. For 2025, as celebrated in the October print issue of Wallpaper*, our survey of exciting studios goes outside, as we sample the inspiring international talent that is transforming the environment around us, shaping everything but the buildings.

Explore the Wallpaper* Landscape Architects’ Directory 2025

While the Architects’ Directory traditionally focuses on residential work and emerging professionals, this year's profiles zoom in on stars in the landscape sector. We cast our net far and wide, taking in young as well as established practices, exploring diverse iterations of what landscape is, and spanning Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. For a one-time-only appearance, welcome to our 2025 Landscape Architects’ Directory. Follow the links to read a full profile of each featured practice.

Terremoto, USA

Terremoto was founded in Los Angeles in 2013 by David Godshall and Alain Peauroi (who passed away this January – ‘the biggest thing that our studio has endured to date’, Godshall says). Now, its team runs as a thriving collective and has a second base in San Francisco. Its inherent transparency and openness about its values – ecological, philosophical, social, moral – make it a powerful proposition in its field and define both its methods and output.

Read more about Terremoto and see its projects

Studio Knight Stokoe, UK

Studio founders Martin Knight and Claire Stokoe argue that landscape architecture has been overlooked. While a focus on climate and biodiversity emergencies has emerged strongly in recent years, the pair behind Studio Knight Stokoe feel there’s more to be said about a particular aspect of the profession. ‘An area that is being looked at less, that has huge potential, is taking as strong a focus on a retain, reuse and recycle agenda for existing landscapes, and questioning whether wholesale replacement of spaces, built elements, and planting, is the right approach, just to deliver a particular vision for a place. Can these elements not be woven into the fabric of the landscape solution for a place?’ they ask.

Read more about Studio Knight Stokoe and see its projects

Estudio Ome, Mexico

Estudio Ome from Mexico City was founded in 2018 by the Franco-Mexican duo Hortense Blanchard and Susana Rojas Saviñón. The landscape studio 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’, the partners 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.

Read more about Estudio Ome and see its projects

Rural Futurisms, South Africa

Lesego Bantsheng and her practice, Rural Futurisms NPC, aim to shake up the notion of landscape. Founded in 2023 and working in Southern Africa, in particular rural northern South Africa, the studio is a collective of researchers, designers, a historian and a climate activist, ‘interested in imagining a collective future of rurality that stems from its rich heritage’. Rural Futurisms is a non-profit organisation, and Bantsheng is also a practising urban designer at Maccreanor Lavington in Rotterdam (as well as a contributor at the African and diasporic spatial practitioners network Matri-Archi(tecture)). In her many hats, Bantsheng works internationally, challenging perceptions of what landscape is and how it can affect communities.

Read more about Rural Futurisms and its projects

Studio Zewde, USA

‘Every project begins with listening – to the land and to people,’ says Sara Zewde, founder of Harlem-based Studio Zewde. ‘Materials, forms, and planting are chosen to reflect and resonate with both. We're defined by our commitment to designing landscapes that are deeply rooted in cultural narratives, ecology and memory.’ Driven by these values, the landscape architect set up her independent practice in New York in 2018, focusing on landscape, urban design, and public art. It now employs about 15 people.

Read more about Studio Zewde and see its projects

VSLA, India

Indian landscape architect Varna Shashidhar, founder and principal of Bengaluru studio VSLA, didn’t always know that her heart – and hands – belonged outdoors. But by the time she earned her master’s in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2006, she was sure of one thing: a desk job in an air-conditioned office just wasn’t on the cards. ‘Landscape has a way of touching your chitta,’ she says, using the Sanskrit word for consciousness. ‘In India, you encounter a different terrain every day. One day, you’re walking barefoot on a pilgrimage; the next, you’re tending to wildflowers in your garden. Everything here feels deeply personal.’

Read more about VSLA and see its projects

Emergent Studios, Australia

In the offices of Emergent Studios, the Melbourne-based landscape architecture practice, creative collaboration between landscape architects and digital innovators is revealing an unexpected truth: that the best landscapes are never really finished. ‘There's a lack of control that we welcome as designers,’ says Sarah Hicks, the studio's design director. ‘We see the role of emergence as being intrinsic to landscape design.'

Read more about Emergent Studios and see its projects

Rodrigo Oliveira, Brazil

‘A garden has to be imperfect, intuitive, instinctive,’ says Brazilian landscape architect Rodrigo Oliveira. A naturalistic perspective – inspired by Japanese garden methodology and the asymmetric beauty of nature itself – has defined Oliveira's 30-year career. The result is deceptively simple: gardens that appear as if nothing was deliberately done there, yet achieve profound harmony between built form and nature. He now has ongoing partnerships with Brazil's architectural elite – Bernardes Arquitetura and Studio Arthur Casas among them.

Read more about Rodrigo Oliveira and see his projects

Kotchakorn Voraakhom, Thailand

The future, as Thai landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom sees it, demands breaking silos and reimagining the designer's role – not as a solitary problem-solver, but as an orchestrator of change. Voraakhom leads her own studio, Landprocess in Bangkok, but also has founded Porous City Network to create a platform for discussing such matters. In the Thai capital, where rising waters threaten the very existence of the city, that change is happening one plant-filled park, one food-producing rooftop, one government complex at a time.

Read more about Kotchakorn Voraakhom and see her projects

Taichi Saito, Japan

‘I hope to create gentle landscapes that allow people’s hearts to feel at ease, even just for a moment,’ says Japanese landscape architect Taichi Sato. ‘By creating more spaces where people can feel the subtle pauses and natural movement that only nature can give, I hope to reconnect people to something deeper and slowly rebuild a meaningful relationship between humans and the natural world.’ Saito has emerged as a quietly rising Japanese landscape architect since founding his company Daishizen in 2011. He works with a raft of top-tier architects (from Sou Fujimoto to Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP) on projects across the country.

Read more about Taichi Saito and see his projects

A subterranean library curved deep into the soil, cocooned in soft slopes of grass. An elliptical shrine rooftop, from which trees rise into the sky. Vivid greenery bursting through the futuristic angles of a buzzy urban development. For Japanese landscape architect Taichi Saito, an underlying thread is woven through all his projects: whether it’s an escapist rural abstraction or an inner-city complex, the aim is to rekindle an innate sense of harmony between humans and nature.

Meet Japanese landscape architect Taichi Saito

‘I hope to create gentle landscapes that allow people’s hearts to feel at ease, even just for a moment,’ he says. ‘By creating more spaces where people can feel the subtle pauses and natural movement that only nature can give, I hope to reconnect people to something deeper and slowly rebuild a meaningful relationship between humans and the natural world.’ Saito – with his holistic nature-rooted philosophies – has emerged as a quietly rising Japanese landscape architect since founding his company Daishizen in 2011. In addition to his own progressive initiatives, he works with a raft of top-tier architects (from Sou Fujimoto to Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP) on projects across the country.

Daishizen’s main brand is Solso, which creates green environments for a wide range of residential, commercial and urban ventures, with every element managed in-house (from planting design and construction to maintenance). The company also runs Keepgreen, a nationwide platform that aims to connect people with plants, through expert-led plant installations, maintenance, product development, retail operations – and even a digial app that uses AI technology to help people integrate greenery into their lives and spaces.

For Taichi Saito, the seed for his green journey is rooted in a nature-steeped childhood in Iwate Prefecture, north Japan, with numerous early memories of helping out at his family’s gardening shop and foraging for wild orchids in forests. Increasingly drawn to architecture, a turning point came when, aged around 16, he stumbled across a book featuring Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater – and something shifted. The moment sparked a personal epiphany, as he woke up to the possibilities within the relationship between architecture and nature.

Training took place through a mix of self-study and working at a flower and plant shop in Tokyo, paving the way for his first horticultural business in 2003, which eight years later evolved into Daishizen. Today, projects are varied in scope and scale – yet tethered by the consistency of his vision. Among them is Library in the Earth, with sloping lines of greenery wrapping a meditative subterranean space designed by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, at Kurkku Fields, an expansive rural project in Chiba, blending organic farming, art, design and culture.

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto is a key collaborator, with the pair harmonising structures and nature on a range of projects – including Shiroiya Hotel, a progressive creative hub in Maebashi, Gunma; a contemporary hall at Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine in Fukuoka, with a tilted elliptical (and season-reflecting) roof packed with greenery; and the circular garden of Not a Hotel Earth, on Ishigaki island in subtropical Okinawa.

Saito also designed landscaping for Not A Hotel Minakami Toji, a new collection of five copper-plated lodges and a restaurant on a nature-steeped mountain in Gunma, by Suppose Design Office. Other projects include Forestgate Daikanyama, a progressive Kengo Kuma-designed urban development in Tokyo, aiming to bring the ‘forest’ to the city, with a stacked wooden box structure packed with plants and trees (it’s also home to a Solso Home shop and Daishizen’s head office; the practice has a number of regional bases elsewhere in Japan too).

‘I never want to impose my vision,’ says Taichi. ‘I believe a landscape designer’s true role is to be a good listener. The ideal is a collaborative process, working closely with architects and interior designers from the earliest planning stages to weave together a unified, resonant narrative that connects deeply with nature.’ For Saito, each project is rooted in its location. ‘I place great importance on using local materials – stone, soil, and trees native to each project’s environment. For large trees in open, sky-facing spaces, I use native species. Closer to human interaction, I incorporate herbs, flowering plants, and grasses – horticultural species chosen for their comfort and sustainability.

‘We aim to source plants locally whenever possible, but we also work with trusted growers across Japan, commissioning the cultivation of around 1,000 plant species, and we raise some ourselves at our own nursery. Each plant carries its own history – and I treat that as part of the landscape,’ he says. Saito mindfully creates the gentlest human imprint on the landscape: ‘I focus on creating what I call a “necessary sense of nature” – something drawn from careful analysis of environment, geography, history and local vegetation. Through subtle human intervention, I aim to awaken and enhance the natural beauty that already belongs in the landscape.’

Saito’s work is unwaveringly imprinted with a sense of Japan – a culture deeply harmonised with the natural world, as reflected in its seasonal sensitivity, traditional culture and nature-inspired concepts of beauty. ‘Since I was born and raised in Japan, everything I create naturally springs from Japanese sensibilities,’ he says. ‘Animism, the appreciation of ma (negative space), sensitivity to moisture and shifting light – these are all part of my design language. Whether it’s the placement of a stone, the shimmer of shade beneath a tree, or the quiet change of seasons, I believe these subtle elements strongly reflect Japanese aesthetics.’

And for Saito, his lifetime quest to harmonise humans and nature has perhaps never been more timely. As he explains: ‘In a world that increasingly values diversity and sustainability, I believe landscapes offer one of the most visible and powerful expressions of these values. A landscape is something vast – it holds and shelters us. When people experience the “space” and “time” inherent in ecological cycles or plant succession, it awakens a deep, almost instinctive sense of connection with nature. Through that connection, gratitude arises – and that gratitude is key to building a truly sustainable future.’

The awards keep coming: UN Global Climate Action Awards; BBC100 Women; The Bloomberg Green 30. But for Kotchakorn Voraakhom, the real measure of success isn't the recognition, but whether Bangkok will still be above water in 50 years. As founder of Bangkok-based Landprocess, the Thai landscape architect has made it her mission to transform one of the world's most flood-prone cities – Bangkok is sinking 2cm each year while sea levels rise, making every monsoon season more dangerous – into a model of climate resilience. The broader mission is to help ‘shift cities to a carbon-neutral future and confront the future climate uncertainty’, she explains from her studio, where 15 designers work on what many might consider impossible urban challenges.

Meet Kotchakorn Voraakhom, the Thai force in landscape architecture

Since founding Landprocess in 2012, Voraakhom has pioneered a nature-based approach using living plants as infrastructure. ‘Nature is our medium, our process, and our teacher – humans included,’ Voraakhom says. ‘We are inspired by its systems, where nothing is wasted, where beauty emerges not from form alone, but from function.'

A good example is Chulalongkorn Centenary Park, completed in 2017 as Bangkok's first critical green infrastructure project. Where others saw an underused urban plot, Voraakhom envisioned wetlands, detention lawns, and biodiverse plantings that collect, clean, and reuse a million gallons of rainwater while providing public recreation space.

Then there's the Thammasat Urban Farm, completed in late 2019 as Asia's largest organic rooftop farm. The 22,000 sq m terraced green roof mimics traditional rice paddies, using cascading native plants and vegetables to slow run-off 20 times more efficiently than concrete while producing 20 tons of organic food annually. Her current work spans training government teams across Southeast Asia on flood-resilient plantings and water management, sharing techniques developed through projects such as Chulalongkorn's constructed wetlands and the Thammasat farm's soil-holding root systems.

Voraakhom’s most ambitious current project reimagines Thailand's Government Complex in Bangkok’s Lak Si district. Rather than adding conventional landscaping to the existing 178 acres, Voraakhom is inserting biodiverse green corridors, rooftop gardens with native species, and cooling plant systems that naturally regulate building temperatures for the 40,000 workers. ‘Government buildings worldwide often reflect authority rather than accessibility,’ she observes. ‘But what if civic architecture could embody transparency, sustainability, and human connection instead?’

The koan comes from hard-won experience, each project teaching Voraakhom that beautiful parks filled with ornamental plants aren't enough if larger systems remain broken. The most exciting shift for her, though, is moving beyond traditional design to co-create transformative processes where communities, policymakers, and ecosystems all shape the outcome. If nothing else, she’s learnt that lasting change requires bringing together people who don't usually collaborate: bureaucrats and community leaders, engineers and botanists, residents and officials.

Which is why, in 2017, Voraakhom launched Porous City Network, a social enterprise led by landscape architects and urban planners to mobilise communities – especially youth – around plant-based climate solutions to transform vast concrete wastelands into a city-wide web of permeable public green spaces such as urban farms, green roofs, rain gardens and canals filled with water-absorbing plants. Landprocess creates the built projects, she explains, while Porous City empowers. ‘Landscape architecture has never been more critical,’ Voraakhom argues. ‘Our discipline holds vital solutions for the climate crisis, but the key lies in collaboration.’

The future, as Voraakhom sees it, demands breaking silos and reimagining the designer's role – not as solitary problem-solver, but as orchestrator of change. In Bangkok, where rising waters threaten the very existence of the city, that change is happening one plant-filled park, one food-producing rooftop, one government complex at a time.

‘Every project begins with listening - to the land and to people,’ says Sara Zewde, founder of Harlem-based Studio Zewde. ‘Materials, forms, and planting are chosen to reflect and resonate with both. We're defined by our commitment to designing landscapes that are deeply rooted in cultural narratives, ecology and memory.’

Driven by these values, the landscape architect set up her independent practice in New York in 2018, focusing on landscape, urban design, and public art. It now employs about 15 people. Zewde leads a rich variety of projects across the US, while also teaching as Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

The studio’s ongoing projects include many highlights from the current US arts and culture scene, such as the Dia Beacon landscape in Beacon, NY, where they are set to transform eight acres of land into a resilient, publicly accessible sculptural landscape with over 90 species of meadow plants; the Watts Towers Arts Center landscape in Watts, Los Angeles, CA; Cuyahoga Valley National Park in OH; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, whose roof garden designed by Zewde is due to open its doors with the institution’s launch this autumn. Meanwhile, past projects include the sensitive reimagining of Philadelphia’s landmark Graffiti Pier.

No matter the location, scale or scope, however, all of the studio’s projects are seen as exciting opportunities by Zewde, whose portfolio ranges from New York City residential gardens to a 200-acre national park. Zewde chooses not to single one out as a ‘landmark’ moment and thrives in the diversity of her commissions: ‘We don't really see the trajectory of our work as such! There have been so many years of research of learning, of growing as a team that we really don't see any one particular moment or project as defining in some way. Rather, each project and moment represent various aspects of continued learning.’

Her approach for each project is, fittingly, equally varied. There is no single, signature aesthetic at Studio Zewde. All works are united in their methodology and investigative research, which challenges assumptions, tailored to each site’s conditions and client and communities’ ambitions. ‘Landscape architecture is a discipline quietly constrained by historical precedents,’ she says.

‘There is a sense of how landscapes should look and function. However, if landscape architecture were to expand and evolve as a creative discipline, the profession has the potential to become a truly transformative field, serving to address ecological challenges and create deeply moving places of beauty and cultural resonance.'

Indian landscape architect Varna Shashidhar, founder and principal of Bengaluru studio VSLA, didn’t always know that her heart – and hands – belonged outdoors. But by the time she earned her master’s in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2006, she was sure of one thing: a desk job in an air-conditioned office just wasn’t on the cards. ‘Harvard introduced me to fantastic friends and mentors, and led me to the best scientists, ecologists and designers at the cutting edge of the discipline,’ she says. To her mind, the final frontier was working in her own country, but she didn’t mind taking a little detour first.

We meet VSLA, the Indian landscape architecture studio

An internship opportunity with renowned Sri Lankan architect C Anjalendran led her to Colombo, where, for the first time, she experienced architecture not through books or studio models, but by immersing herself in natural and cultural landscapes, and in the quiet rhythm of her mentor’s home studio verandah. ‘It was more than drawing or planning,’ she recalls. ‘Just sitting there, by the Parijata tree, watching how the house breathed with the landscape – it taught me more than any lecture ever could.’ That quiet, open-air classroom would become the seed of her future practice: one guided by observation, intuition, and a profound respect for place.

‘These experiences helped me see my own country from a different perspective – to really examine things I had always taken for granted, and to recognise the beauty of what we have,’ says Shashidhar, who returned to the US after her internship. She spent the next three years honing her skills at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in Boston and the Philadelphia-based WRT, both leading landscape architecture firms. But by 2010, the pull to return home and chart her own path became impossible to ignore. Her vision took root when she founded VSLA in her Bengaluru garage.

These days, for Shashidhar, the line between work and life has all but disappeared. ‘Landscape has a way of touching your chitta,’ she says, using the Sanskrit word for consciousness. ‘In India, you encounter a different terrain every day. One day, you’re walking barefoot on a pilgrimage; the next, you’re tending to wildflowers in your garden. Everything here feels deeply personal.’ And equally beautiful – because if there’s one thing Shashidhar has mastered, it’s finding beauty in the everyday.

As she puts it, ‘The most compelling landscapes evolve gradually, shaped by time, terrain, and a deep harmony with native ecosystems.’ Though her studio has grown over the years, she’s intentionally resisted scaling up. ‘I see the benefit of maintaining a small practice. It allows for an intimacy of spirit, with each other and with the landscape,’ she explains. Her team rarely exceeds four members. And just as she doesn’t measure impact by size, she doesn’t measure value by budget either. ‘The more challenging the project,’ she says, ‘the better.’

It’s no surprise, then, that her portfolio reads like a Wunderkammer – a rich collection of institutional landscapes, private gardens, and everything in between. ‘I’ve always seen private homes as a space to experiment and learn,’ she says. ‘But ultimately, the goal is to give back and create impact at a more public scale.’ She is particular about approaching landscapes through a local lens, ‘exploring plant palettes and uncovering those quiet, unique elements that make our landscapes so distinctive’.

Her projects span a wide range of scales and intentions – from the creation of didactic, ecology-driven landscape for a school in 2015 to the design of a verdant garden of native edibles and medicinal plants for Byg Brewski, then India’s largest microbrewery, in 2018. The following year, she transformed a one-acre site at the Bangalore International Centre into an urban remediation landscape, featuring over 75 species of indigenous and adapted vegetation.

Currently, she’s working on a healing garden in Kathiwada, Madhya Pradesh, and the landscape of a museum near Hampi, yet another step in her ongoing pursuit to root design in care, context and culture. In Shashidhar’s world, the grass isn’t just greener – it’s native, intentional, and quietly revolutionary.

‘A garden has to be imperfect, intuitive, instinctive,’ says Brazilian landscape architect Rodrigo Oliveira. It’s a philosophy that has made him one of Brazil's most sought-after landscape professionals. A naturalistic perspective – inspired by Japanese garden methodology and the asymmetric beauty of nature itself – has defined Oliveira's 30-year career. Rather than imposing order on the landscape, he creates what he calls 'spontaneous-looking gardens that blend seamlessly into the surroundings’. The result is deceptively simple: gardens that appear as if nothing was deliberately done there, yet achieve profound harmony between built form and nature.

We meet and chat with Rodrigo Oliveira

The journey to this mindset began in Oliveira’s hometown of Paraná in southern Brazil, where gardens were an intrinsic part of his childhood. ‘I used to take care of the gardens in all the houses we lived in,’ he recalls. And when landscaping was not yet a 'big thing’, he studied agronomy at the Federal University of Viçosa, graduating in 1993. After working under contract with other landscape companies and studying arboriculture in Florida for a year, he established his independent practice, Rodrigo Oliveira Paisagismo in 2005.

Today, his São Paulo-based studio is one of Brazil’s most respected landscape practices and employs 40 people, including architects, engineers, marketing specialists, and dedicated gardeners. The breakthrough that transformed Oliveira’s career came in 2005 through an unexpected collaboration, when Isay Weinfeld invited him to create a garden for the house the architect was designing for the Brazilian film director Hector Babenco in São Paulo. Oliveira seized the opportunity to create something genuinely natural. ‘That was the key point in the beginning of my career and changed my path completely,’ he reflects.

The garden featured a dramatic approach where visitors entered from the street into what Weinfeld has described as ‘a forest’ – a long meandering walk through dense foliage without sight of the house, until a sudden turn brings Casa Babenco into view. This cinematic experience, befitting a collaboration with a film director, established Oliveira's reputation for creating landscapes that unfold like carefully crafted narratives. The project led to ongoing partnerships with Brazil's architectural elite – Bernardes Arquitetura, and Studio Arthur Casas, among them.

The Patios House, designed by Studio MK27, exemplifies Oliveira's naturalistic approach. Located on Rio de Janeiro's coast, the beach house features landscaped courtyards that serve as delicate threads connecting built elements and outdoor spaces. Equally impressive is the AEA House by Jacobsen Arquitetura, set within 7,000 square metres of dense forest near Rio de Janeiro. Here, Oliveira's naturalistic philosophy finds perfect expression. The landscape preserves existing vegetation of mature trees and exposed rock formations to create a seamless fusion between the new garden and the surrounding environment.

Oliveira is currently working on the Amauri 306 Building in São Paulo, another Isay Weinfeld project. It is a further refinement of his practice, where gardens distributed across different floors blend seamlessly with the physical architecture. Developers, he observes, appreciate ‘gardens in their buildings, not just for the aesthetic, but for the city environment too’.

This appreciation reflects Oliveira's understanding of landscape's broader role in contemporary Brazil, his naturalistic approach offering a compelling alternative to more formal design traditions. By embracing what he calls the ‘irregularity’ of natural systems – their textures, movement, and seasonality – Oliveira is creating gardens that evolve beautifully over time while requiring minimal maintenance. In a world increasingly concerned with environmental stewardship, his philosophy resonates. The best gardens don't fight nature. They celebrate it.

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.’

Something compelling is taking shape in the offices of Emergent Studios, the Melbourne-based landscape architecture practice. Here, creative collaboration between landscape architects and digital innovators is revealing an unexpected truth: that the best landscapes are never really finished.

‘There's a lack of control that we welcome as designers,’ says Sarah Hicks, the studio's design director. This insight stems from emergence theory – the idea that complex systems end up being more than the sum of their parts – which also gives the studio its moniker. ‘We see the role of emergence as being intrinsic to landscape design,’ Hicks says, explaining that landscapes evolve over time through growth, succession, and the interactions of other species, far beyond their original design and construction.

Meet Australia's Emergent Studios

Emergent’s six-person practice, led by founding directors Matt Hamilton, Niki Schwabe, and Hicks, has spent over a decade perfecting what they call 'all hands-on deck’ collaboration. Their bijou scale enables something relatively rare in landscape architecture: director input across all projects, from social housing developments to health and education facilities.

Crucially, at the heart of this approach lies a sophisticated digital toolkit that transforms how landscapes are analysed and documented. ‘We are a paperless office, starting all design work from digital hand drawing,' Hicks explains, describing the organic process of moving from initial sketches on digital tablets to technical modelling and complete documentation through specialised software. This mix of intuitive hand-drawing and computational precision reflects Emergent’s broader philosophy: embracing both the art of landscaping and cutting-edge technology. At a more granular level, Hicks says the studio’s work is ‘driven by the potential role of landscape to shape ecological biodiversity and social value in the built environment.’

The most striking expression of this approach is the Munarra Centre for Regional Excellence in Shepparton, which opened last August as an education and sporting facility honouring First Nations culture. Working alongside ARM Architecture, the studio created a landscape and building shaped entirely through co-design with Yorta Yorta community members – the traditional owners of this part of Australia.

The Munarra project showcases Emergent’s commitment to what Hicks calls ‘regenerative conditions’ – both ecologically and socially. The landscape features biodiverse plantings of species nominated by Yorta Yorta Elders for their cultural significance: Murnong (Yam Daisy), Garawun (Mat-rush), and indigenous wildflowers that create learning landscapes to be harvested for community workshops.

Equally transformative was Emergent’s breakthrough project in late 2023. The narrm ngarrgu Rooftop Terrace atop Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market library is an elevated civic space that demonstrates the studio’s ability to create biodiverse urban ecosystems that serve multiple communities at once. The design includes a ceremonial sand circle, interactive water play, and artwork by First Nations artist Maree Clarke that transform functional elements into sculptural play spaces. The wurru wurra outdoor terrace connects the bubup wilam Children's Library with family services to create a secure yet welcoming environment where indigenous plants are visited by native birds, marsupials, and butterflies above the market's bustling activity below.

Looking ahead, Hicks and her partners are busy scaling their digital innovations with the upcoming release of DOCOplant, a comprehensive planting tool featuring an authentication system and online plant database, which will be accessible by the broader industry. Meanwhile, they're deep into an ecological restoration project transforming a southeastern cattle farm back to swampy woodlands, whilst investigating how agricultural landscapes can regenerate around centuries-old River Red Gums. ’We need to see a growth of public investment in landscape architecture and its stewardship to address future challenges within the built environment,’ Hicks argues.

In a time of climate urgency, this approach suggests that the future of landscape lies not in control, but in collaboration with communities, Country, and the wild intelligence that emerges when we create spaces where life is allowed to grow, well, naturally. Luckily for us, practices like Emergent Studios are showing us exactly just how that future might take root.

Transparency in all its forms plays a pivotal role in Terremoto’s ethos. The landscape architecture practice was founded in Los Angeles in 2013 by David Godshall and Alain Peauroi (who passed away this January – ‘the biggest thing that our studio has endured to date,’ Godshall says); but now, its team runs as a thriving collective and has a second base in San Francisco. Its openness about its values – ecological, philosophical, social, moral – makes it a powerful proposition in its field and defines both its methods and output.

Getting to know LA landscape architects Terremoto

‘It's important to our team to practice in ways that reflect these beliefs. For example, we have a stance on labour, in that we proactively acknowledge, credit and advocate for the individuals and crews who build our projects, and this public stance is almost non-existent in our industry. Speak up!’ says Godshall.

It was an early encounter with the book ‘City Form and Natural Process’ by Michael Hough, following a suggestion from his mother to look into landscape architecture, that led Godshall to his current career path. Blown away by the depth and importance of the book’s thesis, which examines ‘why wildlife in urban environments was mostly present in feral, wild or non-designed spaces,’ he decided to go into the profession and change that. ‘Why shouldn’t landscape be purposefully designed for wildlife too?’ he wondered.

Now, the studio has several projects on the go, including some that sit adjacent to architectural icons, of which California is not short of. It is ‘a fun philosophical territory to swim into,’ says Godshall. The team is currently working on Richard Neutra's Lovell Health House in Los Angeles, reconciling early Modernist architecture and philosophy with today’s push towards using mostly indigenous plants and local materials.

They have been reworking the planting around the Hollyhock House by Frank Lloyd Wright and just wrapped up phase two of a project at the Sea Ranch Lodge. He explains: ‘We quietly believe that historic architecture is perhaps best brought into its next era through revitalising the landscapes around them; architecture is inescapably a more fixed medium, whereas in the landscape things live and die and thrive and age, and we're thus honoured to bring these buildings into their next, more ecologically astute eras.’

This also aligns with the studio’s belief that gardens can never quite be deemed ‘finished’. Landscape is in a constant process of change: growth, death, life and maintenance. It’s all ultimately about stewardship, a challenge which Terremoto are keen to highlight and take on. ‘Our best projects, we get to tinker on forever,’ Godshall adds. Embracing the land and understanding this process is important in carving a sustainable path to the future, he explains. ‘We believe that America urgently needs an ecological revolution, and to do so we're going to need to endow the citizenry of our country with the bravery, skills and ecological literacy they will need to collectively will this revolution into existence.’

Landscape architecture is an often overlooked area of design, Martin Knight and Claire Stokoe argue; and while a focus on climate and biodiversity emergencies has emerged strongly in recent years, putting the outdoors more and more into the spotlight, the pair behind Studio Knight Stokoe feel there’s more to be said about a particular aspect of the profession.

‘An area that is being looked at less, that has huge potential, is taking as strong a focus on a retain, reuse and recycle agenda for existing landscapes, and questioning whether wholesale replacement of spaces, built elements, and planting, is the right approach, just to deliver a particular vision for a place. Can these elements not be woven into the fabric of the landscape solution for a place? Are they not part of the established character and material memory of place?’ they ask.

Meet Studio Knight Stokoe

Knight and Stokoe co-founded their namesake, small but dynamic landscape architecture and urban design practice in the south-west of England in 2022. Aiming to remain boutique and nimble, the studio follows the same approach in its projects too, valuing quality and craft over volume – with just the two directors as permanent members of staff and a family of skilled collaborators on their books, bringing specialised expertise where needed.

This also allows them to have hands-on involvement in each project: ‘When you work with us, you'll always be working directly with either Martin or Claire, which is something we've found clients and collaborators are responding really positively to,’ they say. The studio’s B Corp certification is further proof of their commitment to accountability and sustainable practice. They flag: ‘At our core, we're guided by three interconnected principles: resilience, regeneration, and empathy. We craft landscapes that harmonise society and nature, creating places that can adapt to challenges while actively enhancing the environments they inhabit.’

Their first completed project, Plant, a revived brutalist garden at Mountbatten House in Basingstoke, not only perfectly embodies these values, but it was also a landmark project for the young firm. The task outlined the reimagining of the Grade II-listed Registered Park and Garden’s ‘hanging gardens’ for today’s needs. It required delicate tackling of the existing environment, respecting designer James Russell's original 1970s vision for the grounds.

As a result, the scheme achieved wide acclaim as well as a BREEAM Outstanding certification, showcasing seamlessly Knight and Stokoe’s ‘craft-to-high-tech’ approach that favours a balance between artistry and functionality. ‘Without question, being appointed for the technical construction design and delivery of Plant was transformative. It represented a huge vote of confidence from the developer and contractor in our capabilities as designers and as a business,’ they say.

Since its completion, the studio has been going from strength to strength. It has an ongoing stewardship role at Plant, where the directors guide the establishment of its gardens over time (‘It is very rare to secure such a role,’ they highlight); it is currently involved in the retrofit and reuse of a Grade II-listed building on the harbourside at Canons Wharf in Bristol, creating new outdoor amenity spaces; and it is also working on a new micro-urban forest school in the heart of Westminster, London. These and other projects across the UK, from private gardens to commercial and public spaces, make for an exciting future for the young practice.

Think of hanging gardens and lush cascading green terraces and the image conjured up might not immediately take you to Basingstoke, UK. Yet this is exactly where such a project is located; welcome to Plant, the impressive new scheme by Studio Knight Stokoe. Founded in 2022 by partners Martin Knight and Claire Stokoe, the landscape practice, was called upon to revive the protected gardens of an important Grade II listed modernist building - Mountbatten House.

While Twelve Architects worked on the complex’s internal refurb to a commercial workplace (all in collaboration with the client, Mactaggart Family & Partners, developer Longstock Capitaland contractor, CField Construction to complete the Grant Associates and Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios design, to deliver and reinstate the buildings’ original pioneering design intent), the young landscape studio was tasked with rejuvenating its grounds, which were created in 1976 by noted garden designer and horticulturist James Russell.

Explore this reworked brutalist garden

The landscape scheme includes five levels of terraced roof gardens and ground-level areas. Injecting 21st-century flair to the historical building, Knight and Stokoe continued the themes from the original design. The former explains: ‘The terraces are designed and constructed as you would a private garden at ground level, in that there are no raised planters, and areas of paving, lawn, and planting beds transition seamlessly. This project is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ensure the gardens can be used and enjoyed for at least the next 50 years of the building’s life.'

Supported by the client, who aimed to sensitively retrofit and reuse the existing building and reestablish its gardens, Knight Stokoe was only six months old when the team took on the project. Maintaining Russell’s concept for the green space to be ‘informal, elaborate, romantic, overflowing, and tumbling,’ the gardens were redesigned to be resilient to extreme weather, which was reflected in the plant species.

These bridge ‘original planting palettes, provide for pollinators and enhance ecological habitats and biodiversity,’ Knight and Stokoe, who place sustainability at their work’s heart and whose studio is B Corp-registered, explain. ‘The relationship between internal and external spaces is also crucial, with building occupants having direct and inclusive access to each garden, fostering deeper connections with the natural world.’

knightstokoe.co.uk

No new neighbourhood is complete without green space, but many developments have an unfortunate tendency to think a simple stretch of lawn and a couple of flowerbeds will do. Thankfully, it’s an entirely different story at the new waterfront park at China Basin in San Francisco’s new mixed-use district of Mission Rock, just across from the Giants’ Oracle Park.

Explore San Francisco's new waterfront park at China Basin

A waterfront public space on the site of a former parking lot, the new five-acre China Basin Park offers lush green spaces, diverse amenities and dramatic views. It was designed as the beating heart of the new neighbourhood, developed as a public-private partnership between the San Francisco Giants, developers Tishman Speyer, and the Port of San Francisco.

Along with existing Phase 1 buildings by the likes of MVRDV, Henning Larsen, Studio Gang and WORKac, the park showcases the development’s focus on fostering an inclusive community and building resiliently – an innovative approach that earned Scape and its founder Kate Orff the 2023 Obel Award for its Living Breakwaters project. The New York studio has also recently garnered plaudits for transforming the banks of the Mississippi in Memphis into a stunning new public park in collaboration with Studio Gang.

‘The park is a place for people to gather and feel the energy coming from really diverse contexts – from the ballpark on gameday, to the rhythms of daily life from the Mission Rock neighbourhood, to the majesty of the bay horizon beyond to the intimacy of China Basin’s watery edge. The park responds to all of these forces,’ said Orff.

It also connects Mission Rock with the rest of the city, as the San Francisco Bay Trail runs directly through the park, completing a key piece of a 350-mile system. Elevated approximately five feet above ground, the trail functions as a primary line of protection from coastal flooding for the new neighbourhood and its park. The site was also lifted to a resilient elevation by using lightweight fill and is now 10 per cent lighter than it was before.

‘We’ve designed a mosaic of destinations that are in dialogue with this context: sunny open plazas, shady lifted groves, active stadium seating, expansive community lawns, a massive immersive stormwater garden, and a beachfront ecosystem all within a modest five-acre footprint – and all supercharged by the Bay Trail that loops them altogether,’ says Orff.

From the central plaza, visitors can take in the views over the Bay Bridge and downtown skyline, with the baseball stadium providing the perfect backdrop to a statue of Willie McCovey, the Giants first baseman. There’s also a series of raised stadium seats that allow groups to gather and watch the bustle of Oracle Park across McCovey Cove, and a promenade lined with seating and a concrete floor references the patterns created by the tide washing up and down the beach.

The plaza is surrounded by a series of spaces inspired by the unique ecosystems of the Bay Area, and each magnifying a different local landscape. The adjoining Gathering Grove, for example, is sheltered from the wind by sculptural red-trunked Marina strawberry trees which over time will expand to form an undulating canopy. Lit up with catenary lights, the pink plaza is designed to welcome cultural events, classes and fairs.

Another event space is the Great Lawn, framed by Monterey cypress and a variety of oak trees. Sculpted to create the illusion of a natural amphitheatre and undulating green space spilling into the water, it slopes down towards the seafront and Shoreline Sands. By the water, seating and climbing elements made of reclaimed eucalyptus branches emerge from the sand, with an oyster shell strip marking the edge of the area.

Buffering the park’s edge along Pier 48, an 11,000-sq-ft stormwater garden helps treat, store, and convey runoff water from the new neighbourhood. A haven for birds and insects, it’s accessible through a series of elevated boardwalks, from which visitors can admire native plants that can endure intense periods of flooding and drought, such s sticky monkey-flower, giant wildrye and California fuchsia.

The only building in the park, an all-gender public restroom by local studio Min Design, is almost invisible. Tucked away under a lawn near the central plaza, it is located just across from the beach and Bay Trail, to provide a safer experience for all users.

Scape is currently designing the landscape for the Sustainability Commons at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, the Hayward Shoreline Master Plan, and the UCSF Parnassus Central Campus landscape.

scapestudio.com

missionrock.com

At Longwood Gardens, somewhere during the tenth minute of the after-dark, Beatles-inspired, light-and-water spectacular on show – right as 'Golden Slumbers' transitions into 'Carry That Weight' over the speaker system – a visitor may gaze at the tiny buds of flame dancing atop the 20-odd spurting fountains and wonder: What is this place?

Stroll through Longwood Gardens

'You come in, and what you see first is this crystalline ridge,' says Marion Weiss. The architect – one half, alongside husband Michael Manfredi, of New York-based firm Weiss/Manfredi – is referring to what is (in daylight at least) the most eye-catching feature of the 1,000-acre expanse of Pennsylvania hills and forests, an elevated row of glazed conservatories sitting above the central fountain court.

With a striking new addition from Weiss/Manfredi, a renovated greenhouse from midcentury modernist architecture master Roberto Burle Marx, and a tuned-up, cleaned-up landscape scheme from the office of Reed Hildebrand, the glittering hilltop complex is the centrepiece of Longwood Reimagined, a comprehensive expansion of the century-old public garden aimed at connecting it with a bigger audience than ever before.

The new structures, like the nighttime musical extravaganza, are key to that effort, providing more reasons for guests from Philadelphia (less than an hour away) and Manhattan (two and a half) to make the trek to the former estate of the wealthy DuPont family.

Yet Longwood Reimagined is also more than meets the eye: hidden behind the main conservatories, Weiss/Manfredi’s new administrative and education building, The Grove, provides all-modern facilities in a crisp, light-filled box – a huge improvement on the previous on-site offices, described by Manfredi as 'the world’s loveliest Taco Bell.'

Steps away, tucked into what Hildebrand calls 'a series of hedge-rooms', a new bonsai garden will provide quiet, contemplative moments amidst Longwood’s vastness and splendour. And beneath the main ridge, concealed behind what was previously a simple retaining wall, a new underground dining concourse awaits hungry garden-goers, its vaulted ceiling holding up the massive planted terrace above.

'Those vaults have to do a lot of work,' says Weiss, standing in the arcaded restaurant and events hall. The same elegance and ingenuity is evident in the firm’s West Conservatory, likewise supported by an unseen infrastructure embedded in the hillside – and yet it’s the most visible elements of the revitalised garden that count the most.

Over the maze of water-bound walkways, the architects’ new greenhouse sports an irregular, constantly shifting canopy, its tree-like piers framing views of what was once the forgotten periphery of the grounds. 'That was the whole premise,' says Manfredi. 'To open up this western section.'

weissmanfredi.com

reedhilderbrand.com

longwoodgardens.org

A garden has always been spatial shorthand for sanctuary; in times of crisis, this gets amplified. As many of us increasingly seek the safe haven of our garden, the local park or nearby nature reserve, we raise a glass to the many, gorgeous green projects that bring cheer and serenity to our everyday lives. From small domestic gardens and urban gardens, to plant-based urban interventions, woodland installations, leafy architectural landscapes and even the dry terrain of desert flora, here, we tour some of the best projects set to green up our views and encourage the healing and balancing power of nature to filter through into our day. 

Morgan North, New York, USA

The complex, mixed-use project that is Morgan North sits in Midtown Manhattan – a part of town that is always in flux. Though demand for office space is changing, taller towers continue to pop up, replacing old structures and filling every last plot of land. It’s predicted that New York’s iconic skyline will be unrecognisable by 2030. And yet, rather than constantly building anew, a handful of developers have set their sights on transforming existing buildings, creating state-of-the-art facilities that meet new workplace standards while also preserving original characteristics.

Promenade Samuel-de Champlain, Canada

Quebec's Promenade Samuel-de Champlain has opened to the public, with the third and final phase of the project now completed, comprising some 2.5km of a waterside urban boulevard. The finished development is a new community space, ideal for bankside walks, beachside cafés, and recreational activities, carefully intertwining urban design with its surrounding context. Architecture studio Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecke wrapped up this final phase 15 years after its initial proposal from Commission de la Capitale Nationale du Québec. The area, set in the heart of the Canadian city, along the St Laurence River, previously consisted of neglected highways and rail corridors, which felt unwelcoming and unloved. The goal was to return the river to the local community.

House Under the Ground, The Netherlands

Eindhoven-based architecture studio WillemsenU has hidden a house in an undulating meadow on the edge of a nature reserve in The Netherlands. Surrounded by wild flowers and meandering streams, House Under The Ground has a curved concrete, green roof that rises from the ground and could easily be mistaken for a grassy hill. Occupying the plot of a former goat house, the two-bedroom house has a compact footprint yet feels generous and expansive inside. The poured concrete roof hides three levels of living spaces beneath it, two of them below ground level. Though, contrary to what you might expect from a mostly underground house, this one is filled with daylight and cleverly connects its inhabitants to the outdoors.

Terremotto, USA

Terremoto is the kind of firm that enthusiastically describes its approach to a recent project as ‘hippie-dippy gooey goodness.’ The landscape architecture design studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco digs a countercultural vibe. After all, they did restore and enhance the landscape of the Sea Ranch Lodge, the historic (and famously hippie modernist) outpost on the Northern California coast master planned by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. Their gardens and landscapes are mini habitats—places where people, pollinators (birds and bees), native plants, and even art share the love. In the 7th Avenue Garden, designed in collaboration with artist David Horvitz, a weedy, vacant lot was transformed into a small park made up of a jumble of milkweed, plumeria, and wildflowers. Terremoto added a few chunky wood benches and a deck, and rubble and rebar from the demolished LACMA buildings were shaped into found-object sculptures. 

Villa M, France

This architectural garden is a vetical one. Design by Brazil and France based Triptyque Architecture and Philipe Starck, the project features an extensive green facade, built around the principles of biophilic design and wellness. The mixed use scheme houses healthcare professionals in an innovative mix, including a hotel, restaurant, bar, conference area, a check-up area, a co-working space, and a showroom for start-ups in the world of health. The idea is ‘to promote mixing, exchanges and mutual aid between the different specialties and the different generations of health professionals,’ explain the architects. 

1105 West Peachtree, USA

This new mixed-use development in the heart of Midtown Atlanta features a garden at its heart. Designed as a ‘sky terrace', this expansive architectural garden not only adds a green lung to the heart of the city but it also helps direct circulation and connects the three different buildings it's placed among (the development comprises residences at 40 West 12th). Designed by Atlanta-based firm SITE solutions, this green space was created around the scheme's masterplan, conceived by architects Rule Joy Trammell + Rubio. The aim was ‘to bring the human experience of the street to the development’s many users, offering a strong sense of community through smart design.'

Hillcrest Meadow Gardens, Canada 

Canadian ecological designer Nina-Marie Lister has been recently announced as the recipient of the prestigious $50,000 Margolese National Design for Living Prize, which is offered by the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture. Recognized by the jury for ‘her commitment to addressing and nurturing the coexistence of wildlife and people in safe, healthy, and interconnected landscapes, as well as connecting people to nature in cities,' the designer has several green projects under her belt. One of them is Hillcrest Meadow Gardens - Lister's own personal home garden, a pollinator meadow with a biodiverse, native urban habitat (pictured above). 

GuangzhouGarden, UK

2021 Chelsea Flower Show’s Gold Medal Winning GuangzhouGarden, created by Grant Associates includes five latticework bamboo structures developed and fabricated by Bristol-based advanced timber structure specialists Xylotek. ‘Taking part in our first RHS Chelsea Flower Show is an exciting creative challenge for us as we look to capture the essence of vast and vibrant Guangzhou, with a population of 15 million people, and distil it down into a garden plot just 20m x 10m!,' says Grant Associates' director Peter Chmiel. Xylotek's Martin Self adds: ‘We were thrilled to work over the past two years with Grant Associates on the design and realisation of the ‘Guangzhou Garden. We particularly enjoyed exploring bamboo’s technical potential and harnessing its capacity to create poetic new forms.'

FormaHQ rooftop, UK

One of London's latest cultural hubs, FormaHQ in Southwark, also boasts a fabulous green roof. The existing modernist building was refurbished and reimagined by Sanchez Benton Architects with international artist Gabriel Kuri and features a cleverly planted rooftop with a garden by Nigel Dunnett. Offering views of the surrounding cityscape as well as respite from its central London's densely built setting, this little gem plays with colour as the greenery contrasts the redesigned building's vibrant orange hues. The building hosts a varied artistic programme and the garden will be open to the public during office hours. 

Garden Among The Courtyards, Italy

Milan has long been a city of secret gardens. In this dense, industrial, grande dame of a metropolis, composed of large apartment blocks and walled-off palazzos, one of the great joys of wandering aimlessly is accidentally discovering the planted clearings and courtyards that offer respite from its fabricated scenery. Still, many such green spots remained private and off-limits to most until recently, when more parks and community vegetable gardens slowly started to make an appearance. Milan Green Week in 2019 and local organisations such as Clever Cities and RoofMatters have been helping to foster sustainable practices in the city, including a culture of urban gardening and green roofs. Brera-based architecture studio Piuarch has been cultivating its own planted roof since 2015, titled Garden Among the Courtyards – enhancing liveability, wellbeing and social relations for both employees and the local neighbourhood. Directors Germán Fuenmayor, Gino Garbellini, Monica Tricario and Francesco Fresa believe that while the design community is aware and engaged in the dialogue about creating more green space in their city, there’s still much to do. ‘It is not only about urban planning but also about subverting social, cultural and educational policies within the city and people,’ says Fresa.

Sky Garden, UK

This new indoor botanical delight is Sky Garden; a green space in the heart of London, right at the top of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Commissioned by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and its charity CW+, the piece was designed by award-winning landscape designer and CW+ Artist in Residence, Jinny Blom. ‘Gardens, quite simply, improve our lives,' says Blom. ‘To go and sit amongst plants and nature, especially in the context of a bustling hospital, has an immediate positive impact on stress levels.  The Sky Garden will provide an irreplaceable source of respite to those in need.' The design takes its cues from Modernist architecture and features clean planter shapes engulfed in greenery and calming colours. 

South Ken Green Trail, UK

The South Ken Green Trail is a new series of green interventions on London’s Exhibition Road. The three projects are ‘The Algae Meadow' by Seyi Adelekun and Wayward (in collaboration with the V&A, and working with specialists from UCL and Imperial College London), ‘Home away from Hive' by Mizzi Studio (pictured here), and ‘Windflower' by Urban Radicals with Adam Harris. They are free for all to visit and together are ‘supporting the post-pandemic recovery of London’s arts and science district,' say the project's organisers. Highlighting our natural environment as well as great design and architecture, the installations are part of the 2021 London Architecture Festival and will remain in place until the Great Exhibition Road Festival which runs from 9-15 October.

Taiyuan Botanical Garden, China

The botanical gardens at Taiyuan City in China commissioned Austrian based studio Delugan Meissl for a new home; and the results are impressive. The team transformed a former coal-mining area into a landscape park, incorporating architectural structures, like pathways, greenhouses and a bonsai museum (pictured above) with planting and greenery of all kinds in a harmonious, eye-catching design. ‘The centrepiece of the buildings, which are very precisely inserted into the modelled topography, consists of three greenhouses, which were realised as three hemispherical timber lattice domes,' explain the architects. Publicly accessible areas are matched by a cleverly integrated research centre containing laboratories, studios, office buildings, workshops, meeting rooms, lecture rooms and a library. 

RHS Hilltop, UK

Designed by architecture studio WilkinsonEyre, RHS Hilltop is the gardening science hub for The Royal Horticultural Society at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey. Blending modern architecture with lush gardens, the project is an exciting new centre for horticultural science and learning, and the result of a five-year transformation. The surrounding green spaces of the newly landscaped Wisley gardens, have been masterplanned by Christopher Bradley-Hole, and designed in detail by Matt Keightley and Ann-Marie Powell. ‘The new centre is designed to integrate with the working gardens and provide a central hub for the scientific community based at RHS Garden Wisley and the million plus visitors that come each year,' says WilkinsonEyre's Geoff Turner. 

New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing Dedicated to Victims of Gun Violence, USA

According to data collected by Gun Violence Archive, at least 5,132 children were shot in the USA last year. As a response, Svigals + Partners have created a garden that ‘honours the lives lost to fatal gun violence in New Haven and raises awareness of the immense emotional impact of the crisis.' The project is located in New Haven and was envisioned as both a green space for healing and a call for action for the local community and beyond. Leafy expanses and sculpture blend in this architectural garden that is perfect for contemplation. 

Silence by Pawel Althamer at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia

Nature, art and contemporary building design meet in this green installation at the Garage museum of contemporary art in Moscow. The brainchild of Polish artist Paweł Althamer, this spatial piece was conceived as a garden for meditation. The project has a clear collaborative and therapeutic nature, according to the artist. ‘Each element of the garden—be it a fallen tree or a particular deciduous bush—is a hidden quote, while the composition as a whole is a unique environment where the restless city dweller of today can alter the regime of time, as if transported to a picturesque space in a past era, where the rhythm and pace of life were not by default accelerated to the limit,' says the museum's statement.

Elephant Springs, UK

There is an exciting new natural stone and water landscape in London. Elephant Springs, located in Elephant Park in South London and designed by landscape architects, Gillespies in collaboration with artist Mel Chantrey of The Fountain Workshop, blends greenery, natural materials and water features in a sculptural environment that is open to all. ‘Elephant Springs sits at the heart of this landmark regeneration project, nestled in an ever-expanding central park that saw the first phase open in 2017 before any of the buildings,' says Gillespies' Armel Mourgue. ‘Our landscape-led approach created very early on a destination for relaxing walks, playful times and essential human interaction. The new phase will see all these activities expand into a much larger park, where unforgettable moments of play and water are revealed amongst a landscape of rain gardens, pockets of lawn and groups of mature trees.'

Little Island, USA

A new public park has opened on the Hudson River. The new green space, which encompasses three new performance venues for New York, is designed by London based Heatherwick Studio, who was invited to the project by philanthropist Barry Diller and the Hudson River Park Trust. Set on an impressive sculputral constellation of some-280 concrete piles that rise from the water, the park was created as a haven for both humans and wildlife, filled with nature and opportunities to connect with it. Its construction was impressive and the result is certainly eye-catching. ‘The project began when we were asked to conceive of a sculptural structure to go on a design for a newly enlarged piece of the Hudson River Park promenade,' says studio founder Thomas Heatherwick. ‘The project was interesting, but we saw the opportunity to create a more engaging experience for New Yorkers and to build on the city’s heritage of inventing exciting new public spaces. Instead, we had the idea to make an entirely new type of pier as a lush rectangular garden island, connected to the land with generous gang-planks as bridges, aligned to the street grid of New York.' This undulating pier structure is like no other. 

Swing Bridge, UK

A project instigated by the community of Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, this elegant new bridge forms part of the landscape at the well-known South London Crystal Palace Park. The structure was designed by architecture studio Tonkin Liu, and it's inspired by the architecture team’s decade-long immersion in biomimetic studies. The project was launched to create a necessary and secure crossing to the park's Dinosaur Islands and their sculptural displays. The Swing Bridget is a pivoting design with one central foundation; this allows it to move and only allow access to the island when needed, therefore protecting the exhibits. Made out of steel, the structure is visually powerful through its skeleton-inspired design and geometries. 

Al Fey Park, Abu Dhabi

Al Fey Park claims to be the Middle East's very first urban biodiversity park. Boasting great biodiversity in its wildlife and planting, as well as its own microclimate and a design by Danish landscape architecture specialists SLA, this green expanse is located in downtown Abu Dhabi. The public park spans. some 27,500 sq m. ‘Al Fay Park is a new type of forest park in Abu Dhabi. Through our extensive research in the region’s flora and fauna, we create a new paradigm for how to think and design public realm in the Middle East. Al Fay Park is a celebration of Abu Dhabi’s native nature and culture and a prime example of how to maximize climate action, increase life-quality, and radically improve the biodiversity of an entire city – all on a former sand site,' says SLA design principal and partner Rasmus Astrup.

Between Heaven and Earth, China 

Created for the Shenzhen Flower show in China, this garden, entitled ‘Between Heaven and Earth', is the brainchild of garden and landscaping outfit McWilliam Studio. The space feels at once delicate and deeply grounded to its site, respectful and expressive. It ‘explores the connections between space and form and the interactions between woodland and water, land and sky,' explain its creators. Combining the water element with paved surfaces, light and textural planting, the design features a series of irregularly placed vertical metal poles, which mirror the surrounding woodland's trees. Some span some 10m high and each carries either a small LED or a misting spray at its top, adding an extra dimension to the installation. With this design, the garden experts scooped the show's Gold Medal.

Hidden Burle Marx Gardens, Brazil

One of Sao Paulo's iconic modernist-inspired office buildings, Condomínio São Luiz was designed by Brazilian architect Marcelo Fragelli in 1984. What many didn't know, is that the development had a Burle Marx designed garden ‘hidden' away in its grounds. Now, a sensitive restoration by Perkins & Will meant the gardens by the iconic landscaping artist could open to the public for the first time in almost 40 years. The architects' retrofit included unifying the workspace's former two receptions into one central hall. This allowed the removal of partitions that surrounded the building, thus creating access into the garden for pedestrians.

The Waiting Room, Somaliland

A small project created and built by architect Rashid Ali Architects with students at Abaarso Tech, the first school of architecture in Somaliland, The Waiting Room is a light, open air, planted structure in the city of Hargeisa. It is also the first structure in the city to be entirely made out of timber. The building sits just outside the city government’s land registry office, within a public courtyard, and offers much needed space for waiting and socialising for both visitors and staff. It connects users with the context and leafy planting in the courtyard. ‘The idea was to design and build a small contemporary building, while also introducing and experimenting with materials and construction techniques that are not familiar locally,' explains the team. ‘Our aim was not just to use such materials just for the sake of it, but to build in a relatively short time from pre-fabricated components and leave possibility for disassembling and for reuse in future.'

Terra Dominicata, Spain

Part of a hotel and winery experience in the Tarragona area, called Terra Dominicata, this expansive terrace and gardens was designed by Spanish architecture and landscaping studio SCOB. Taking its cues from the surrounding Montsant Natural Park, the design included the refurbishment of a set of abandoned, formerly agricultural buildings previously belonging to a monastery, and a series of outdoors spaces, from small courtyards to paved terraces and a swimming pool deck. ‘The materials, the vegetation, the textures and colours, as well as the traditional ways of building are representative of the place together with its historical and cultural heritage,' say the architects. Drawing on the region's planting, the surrounding vineyards and adding climbing frames for wisterias, the team created a green haven, particularly suited for southern gardens with a Mediterranean climate.

scob.es

Samos Garden, Greece

Created to compliment the restoration of a historic villa on the island of Samos in Greece, this garden is the brainchild of Stockholm based architecture studio OOAK. The architects got involved in the scheme to develop a landscaping strategy for the property's grounds, to add a pool and work with the garden in front of the main building and the guesthouse. The team drew inspiration from medieval hortus conclusus (enclosed gardens of the time) and a nearby overgrown space within a fortified monastery. A geometric carpet of recycled brick, gravel and plants was applied, creating a soft, leafy environment. This is contrasted by the sharp, minimalist, black-coloured pool that sits within. OOAK worked with Athens based agriculturist and gardener Marios Virlas, for specialised advice and insights on the horticultural side.

ooakarchitects.com

Brooklyn Heights Garden, New York, USA

NYC-based architecture office Worrell Yeung has led the renovation of a family home's outdoor space in a Historic Landmark District in Brooklyn Heights. The commission consisted of the front and back gardens of a typical brownstone building. The architects also made sure to fine tune existing details to support and enhance the new design; for example, by restoring the historic forged iron fencing and gate details on the front entrance and by enlarging the steel casement openings towards the back, to bring plenty of light into the interiors and better visually connect indoors and outdoors. The project features stone paving, new planters and a new, black custom metal staircase that leads directly into the small rear garden below. ‘This is consistent with a lot of the interior architecture work we do, in which we deploy ‘objects’ within a space. We treated these objects like vitrines, which helped us to organize the cubic hot tub with the plantings, for example,' says co-founder Jejon Yeung.

worrellyeung.com

Guangming OCT Trail, China 

Conceived by international landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm SWA Group, a new circulation route has been installed in China's Guangming District, located north of Shenzhen. The region's picturesque, forested mountain landscapes are a major nature attraction and now, a system of three bridges that float above the undulating terrain allow visitors to take in the rich greenery from a vantage point. Simple, geometric and dynamic, the design is contemporary and invites pedestrians into the tree-filled expanses of the Chinese countryside. What started as a smaller project to expand and finess a regional jogging and biking trail, has now developed into a ‘an iconic destination that adds value for locals and tourists, while supporting goals for healthy living and urbanization, connecting the city of Shenzhen with its surrounding towns and national parklands,' explains the design team.

swagroup.com

Moor Lane Community Garden, London, UK

Bringing nature into the urban heart of the British capital, a new pop-up community garden has been installed in the City of London. Designed by local landscape firm Wayward, with the support of local community and resident groups, the City of London Corporation and its cultural district, Culture Mile, the project is titled Moor Lane Community Garden. The piece – a series of interlocking, leafy planters – features robust, sculptural bases inspired by the character of the nearby Barbican housing estate and London Wall. Created as a temporary project, but in place at least till next summer, the structure offers a breath of fresh air and acts as a testbed for a future landscaping project in Moor Lane.

wayward.co.uk 

ISPACE, Val Calanca National Park, Switzerland

This project, designed by Davide Macullo Architects, is nestled within rich woodland outside the village of Rossa, in the Calanca Valley of Switzerland. Created with the support of the RossArte Foundation, the municipality of Rossa and the Swiss National Park Val Calanca, and titled ISPACE, the small timber structure offers an architectural resting spot within nature for visitors to the park. ‘ISPACE is a project born out of an idea combining art and architecture in the creation of environments that stimulate people to perceive the influence of a space on their moods,' say the architects. ‘It is a re-evaluation of the territory, allowing us to rediscover our bond with nature.' This structure is the first in a series of similar installations in these woods; nine more architectural sculptures are set to appear in this part of the world in the next months. 

macullo.com

The Landroom Observatory, Israel

The majesty of nature spans thick, green forests, more tropical climes, as well as drier, desert environments. French-Israeli architect Ben Gitai has recently completed a striking architectural installation that harnesses the power of the last – the new Landroom Observatory has been designed to overlook the world's largest geological crater: Makhtesh Ramon in the Negev desert. This structure, created as a sculptural star and desert-gazing observatory, is made entirely out of local sandstone and limestone extracted from the ground around it, making it look and feel entirely of-its-place and camouflaged within its surroundings. It provides visitors to the area a shelter from the sun and a spot to sit, relax and take in the magnificent scenery. The boutique piece is designed to accomodate only two people at a time.

gitaiarchitects.com

Dream Within A Dream, China 

Created as a property sales centre with a twist, Dream Within A Dream is a concept by Shanghai-based Wutopia Lab. ‘Shanghai Huijian invited Wutopia Lab to design a welcoming stage in front of the sales’ center of their project in Huzhou,' explain the architects. ‘The only request from the client was to make it different.' The team drew on the power of nature and landscaping to create an environment that challenges the norm about what a ‘modern city' is. The steel construction includes a forest of volumes, perforated screens and bright white surfaces, which house different ‘landscapes', such as caves, hills, streams, rocks, highlands, waterfalls and auditorium formations.

wutopialab.com

Grosvenor Square, London, UK

Architecture studio Tonkin Liu is behind the revamp of one of central London's rare beasts – the garden square. Upon completion, Grosvenor Square, the second largest garden square in the capital, will be formed by four interlocking gardens based on the project's original oval shape. Principles Anna Liu and Mike Tonkin shaped their design through feedback from local residents and Londoners, and input from experts including Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, LSE Cities and the Green Infrastructure Consultancy. The result is a design that promises to increase biodiversity and double the number of trees in the open space. The refreshed square will include corner gardens with ‘options for small dynamic structures welcoming visitors', as well as shaded seating under the canopy of trees, a sense of openness and a secret water garden.

tonkinliu.co.uk

Houston Botanic Gardens, USA

An island in Houston's Bayou system has recently been re-introduced as the American city's very first botanic garden. International landscape firm West 8 is behind the transformation, which includes a collection of tropical, sub-tropical, and arid plants from around the world. Underpinning everything in local flora and fauna, the garden is also set to showcase the area's amazing biodiversity, which the project encourages. ‘The intent of the site design is to seek balance in all aspects, from planting and soils, through to topography and materials – the careful juxtaposition of order and chaos that is at the heart of enduring gardens,' says West 8 New York office's Donna Bridgeman-Rossi. Working to amplify the existing site's qualities and support sustainability and diversity, the project also features elements to make the user experience as comfortable as possible, such as a series of 21 thin shell concrete vaults that line the perimeter of the main global collection garden (pictured); the alcoves offer shaded rest spots for visitors. 

west8.com

The 2023 Obel Award has been revealed, going to American landscape studio Scape and its founder Kate Orff (member of our Wallpaper* USA 300) for the Living Breakwaters project – an inspiring ecosystems-driven piece of green infrastructure design off the shore of Staten Island in New York. Championing sustainable architecture through pioneering, research-based solutions with an eco soul, Scape's work and the particular project are in perfect alignment with the award's mission – to focus on the ecological and social responsibilities of architecture. 

Chair of the Obel award jury Martha Schwartz said: 'Breakwaters are an ancient idea for how to protect shorelines – and the people who live close to them – by building underwater seawalls to defend a harbour or a beach from the force of waves. Kate has designed an extraordinary, modern-day interpretation, the Living Breakwaters, which will not only protect humans and revitalise the coastline of New York City, but also restore lost marine biodiversity. This is a visionary project that tackles the full task of adaptation, and which has the capacity to inspire and to positively impact vulnerable shorelines worldwide.'

2023 Obel Award winner: Scape and founder Kate Orff

'Winning an architecture prize is really important for a project like this, which involved so many different people working together with a shared purpose. It is a true encouragement for community members, elected officials, landscape architects, ecologists and engineers, to come together and develop coastal adaptation projects wherever they are. It’s also an acknowledgement of the importance of thinking about design at a holistic, planetary scale. Our protective natural systems are in various stages of decline globally, and in order to repair them, we have to think and design systemically to tie the pieces back together. And that is an incredibly bold, creative act. Hopefully, this award can emphasise this point: that nature is a matter of design now and that we have to work fast and work together,' said Orff. 

Living Breakwaters is a complex project (led by Scape, but created by a multidisciplinary team) that required the reimagining of its Staten Island site following 2012's Superstorm Sandy. It comprises a mix of stones and ecologically designed concrete elements, which have been strategically placed to support fin fish, and other marine species, such as oysters in the natural, gradual restoration of the shoreline – the latter species in fact playing a key role as ‘co-designers’ by helping shape and develop the artificial reef formation. 

Orff, who recently also celebrated the opening of Tom Lee Park in Memphis, which she created together with Jeanne Gang's Studio Gang, was a critical player here too, in the quest to restore nature across the site. The design hopes to bring back ‘wonder and wildness’ to this part of Memphis, she told us at the time of our interview on the park. This part of Staten Island hopes to reap the rewards of her visionary design thinking too. 

obelaward.org 

scapestudio.com 

The legacy of the 20th-century American landscape architect James Rose (1913 – 1991) is thrust into the spotlight, thanks to a new exhibition of contemporary art and design installed in his preserved, idiosyncratic midcentury home and garden in the suburbs of Ridgewood, New Jersey (9 September – 2 October 2022). Handbuilt by Rose, known for his use of readymade materials and pioneering approach of fusing the indoors and outdoors, the home, which now functions as the non-profit James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design, is an inspiring and tactile example of the architect’s philosophy, in design, spirituality and beyond.

Titled ‘At the Rose House’, the exhibition is organised by New York-based design firm Green River Project and art and design platform Object & Thing – known for its collaborative, site-specific shows within 20th-century artists’ and architects’ homes – and celebrates Rose’s design accomplishments by highlighting the extent of his influence, both then and now.

By bringing in objects, art and furniture by both Rose’s contemporaries, such as Charles and Ray Eames, Nancy Holt and Anne Truitt, and today’s rising talents, such as new furniture by Green River Project, chairs from the artist Hugh Hayden, ceramics by Johnny Ortiz-Concha, as well as garments by the fashion label Bode that are inspired by Rose’s personal style and eccentricity, the exhibition emphasises the ingenuity and value of the handmade by capturing how fleeting and rare these unique aspects can be.

For Green River Project, bringing this exhibition to life had an especially poignant significance. ‘The ease in which Rose expanded the home using ready-made materials was an early reference for our practice,’ says Aaron Aujla, who co-founded the company with Ben Bloomstein. ‘In particular, there is a kitchen with mahogany shelves and pegboard that we must have spent over one hundred hours dissecting and referring back to over the last five years. Ben and I also started Green River Project as a gallery, in the barn of his family’s farm in upstate New York, so organising this exhibition with [Object & Thing’s] Abby [Bangser] was a great exercise that brought us back to one of our original goals.’

To honour the milestone, Green River Project has created new work with Rose’s spirit in mind. Imagined as if he were making work today, the studio also unveiled pieces made with longtime collaborators and members of their team, such as a cast metal side chair by Bloomstein Industrial,  a wooden chair in Rose's mother;s room Luck Carpentry and rice paper lamps from Preziosi Lighting that can be seen in the dining room, as well as elsewhere.

To accompany several of the artworks that are being displayed, such as paintings by Louis Eisner and Matt Kenny, Green River Project also created new frames that nod to Rose's existing interventions in the house. The firm also created a rosewood  pedestal to accompany an edition of Charles and Ray Eames’ Plywood Sculpture, 1941, which is being released by Eames Office for the first time.

At one time the home of Rose, his sister and his mother, the James Rose Center eventually became a place where research, design and rebellion against the norm is celebrated. Its unique, two-storey structure, which features an open-air upper floor, as well as self-made pools, ponds and fountains that can be seen through the house's windows, would be rare to find today. 

‘Rose was an impossible maverick, called by one author “the James Dean of Landscape Architecture”, but I think he would be very happy with the vision Green River Project LLC and Object & Thing have brought to his house,’ says Dean Cardasis, director of the James Rose Center. ‘We look forward to welcoming new audiences throughout the exhibition.’

INFORMATION

The James Rose Center is open for public visits Tuesday to Sunday, 10am – 4pm during the exhibition. There is a $10 admission fee that benefits The James Rose Center and is charged upon entry.

‘At the Rose House’ runs from 9 September to 2 October 2022

object-thing.com
jamesrosecenter.org

ADDRESS

James Rose Center
506 E Ridgewood Avenue
Ridgewood, New Jersey
T: 1 201 466 6017

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When the medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris caught on fire in 2019, the world was devastated. Now, as plans for the restoration of the important monument are underway, Bas Smets has plans to help bring the beloved, iconic space back to life. The Belgian landscape architect has been appointed to redevelop the expanses around Notre-Dame, greening the Île de la Cité into a mini, verdant paradise in the heart of one of Europe’s largest metropolises. 

His mission, however, goes beyond the immediate landscape. Using plants to help manage temperature, especially in a big urban hub like Paris, is a key tool against climate change. ‘It [climate change] is such a hard thing to grasp and we all feel so small, but we can work on a smaller scale and make a big difference through microclimates. My work is about creating these microclimates. As soon as you can understand how a city works you can “hack” it and improve on current conditions. I don’t think I have a style, but I have a methodology, and that is to try and understand a site and improve its resilience. Use the force of nature to improve life and the environment.’

Landscaping Notre-Dame

Working with architecture studio Grau, Smets also collaborated with a variety of consultants on lighting, water, engineering, public space safety, preservation, and even philosophy, to carve out his proposal. The team worked on enriching an extended area around the cathedral with new trees and all manner of leafy delights, stretching the planted sections, unifying public space, while aligning it with the city around it. A large, paved area right in front of Notre-Dame’s main entrance preserves the important, well-known views of the monument, celebrating it from every angle. 

‘We had to rethink the area of Notre-Dame, but also rethink the whole city, as the Île de la Cité is the cradle of Paris. For example, nobody [used to go] behind the church, even though there was a green space – Parisians never went there,’ Smets points out.

Design development begins immediately, and while works might stall around the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the aim is for the landscaping to be finished by 2027.

Features will include a new – and rare – linear park along the Seine, offering views of the Pantheon and the Paris skyline across the water; a brand new, dedicated visitor centre; a mix of species, including chestnut trees, European nettle tree, and others suitable for drier climes; and a fountain-type feature that will see the paved open space in front of the cathedral flooded with a thin film of water once a day, probably at a set time, imitating the wet pavement after a summer rain, cooling the area down while adding one more element of dynamism and nature to the composition.

‘What we are doing is using shade, humidity, wind and water to lower the temperature in the heart of Paris,’ says Smets. And he should know, as it’s exactly what he managed to do in other locations, such as the Parc des Ateliers, home to Luma Arles, where Smets turned what was a very dry landscape into a leafy green lung. Other past works in Smets’ portfolio include the Part-Dieu square in Lyon and the Sunken Garden in London, a private leafy microclimate within a heritage building. A sculpture garden in Long Island, USA, is among ongoing works.  

As for his ambitions for Notre-Dame? ‘We wanted to make a nuanced composition,’ he says. ‘You’ll walk in, sit, stay, go underground, open towards the river, emerge close to the entrance… More than giving a form, we are giving an experience.'

INFORMATION
bassmets.be

With studios in Toronto and Halifax, architect Omar Gandhi is known for his distinct style, which often offers a modern twist to the rural vernacular. His work responds to regional architectural varieties and, facing the Atlantic Ocean, the Peggy’s Cove Infrastructure Improvement Strategy is a case in point. The project highlights the landform of Peggy’s Cove in the Canadian Maritimes, a narrow inlet carved from wave formed glacial granite. Now, on it, a new viewing deck elevates the impressive geologic scale of the shoreline, with a view of Peggy’s Point Lighthouse, the famous red and white lighthouse built atop of granite boulders.

The small fishing village on the eastern shore of St Margaret’s Bay near Halifax in Nova Scotia is rumoured to be named ‘Peggy’s Cove’ after the wife of an Irish immigrant who settled there in the 18th century. Historically its landscape has been rife for fishing, mining, lumbering and farming. Today, it continues to be an active fishing community, as well as a popular tourist attraction of the Canadian east coast. 

The harsh terrain of the coastline has made it difficult for many to have accessible views of the landmark. Going beyond meeting building regulations, the architects prioritised principles of accessibility, with a unifying pathway connecting the two main access points to the site. This way, the benefits of the views are extended to all locals and visitors of the cove. Embedded within the design are seating spaces, a levelled platform, tactile indicators and handrails with a separate building providing public washroom facilities with large hallways and stalls, including adult changing tables. 

Following local coastal construction methods, the viewing platform seamlessly blends into the landscape of wave washed boulders. As it’s built atop the ridges of the shoreline, elevating the deck was crucial in maintaining a levelled platform for the parking lot and drop-off area - but also to ensure protection from rising sea levels. Guard rails with open netting alongside the use of eastern white cedar panels were used to counter the harsh prevailing winds. The architects state that ‘extensive wave modeling was undertaken to ensure we placed the primary components at an elevation that provides protection from the strong waves striking the coastline.’

The team continues: ‘Green spaces are expanded with planters and landscaped zones, that use a mixture of native plant species, to support and sustain the local ecology and educate a larger audience to the unique biosphere of the coastal barrens.’

Omar Gandhi and his studio's design for the Peggy’s Cove Infrastructure Improvement Strategy celebrates this impressive natural landscape through sensitive architectural intervention, as it unravels the picturesque and serene view of the Canadian maritime landscape.

INFORMATION

omargandhi.com

The Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize was founded in 2019 to celebrate the late, great designer’s often-overlooked field, as well as honour her influential and pioneering work. Architectural gardens, sustainability and the need for communities to connect with green, open spaces are all critical aspects of the profession that Oberlander was deeply passionate about – and the Vancouver-based landscape architect was talking about them long before most others did. Now, aiming at continuing her legacy, the prize will be given every two years and the inaugural award has just been announced: crowning American landscape architect Julie Bargmann as the 2021 Oberlander Prize winner. 

The Oberlander Prize was set up by The Cultural Landscape Foundation in Washington DC. It includes a cash prize that comes accompanied by two years of public engagement activities focused on the laureate and landscape architecture. The recipient is an individual who is ‘exceptionally talented, creative, courageous, and visionary' and has ‘a significant body of built work that exemplifies the art of landscape architecture', say the organisers. 

Bargmann is the founder of D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) studio, and a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. Through her three-decade career, the landscape architect has tirelessly championed the power of designing for the outdoors. Her work focuses on contaminated, neglected, and forgotten urban and post-industrial sites, transforming them into artfully designed havens of green and calm. 

2021 Oberlander Prize jury recognise ‘impact on the public landscape’

‘Unearthing the raw ingredients of design from waste and wastelands defines my life’s work,' Bargmann explains. ‘Both the pedagogy of my teaching and my methodology as a designer address the social and ecological imperatives to reclaim degraded land. Integrating regenerative technologies with design propositions and built landscapes embodies my contribution to the discipline of landscape architecture.'

The jury, including chair Dorothée Imbert, architect Tatiana Bilbao, and designer Walter Hood, was impressed by her body of work. They awarded her the 2021 Oberlander Prize for ‘her leadership in the world of ideas, her impact on the public landscape, her model of an activist practice, and her commitment to advancing landscape architecture both through teaching and design.’

INFORMATION

tclf.org

Designed to complement a renovated and extended 1920s timber chalet in the Swiss countryside, this lush Geneva garden is the work of Belgian landscape architect Erik Dhont. A deft hand at blending nature and architecture to produce artful, flowing, rich compositions, Brussels-based Dhont created this green design for Karin Handlbauer, founder of Galerie Mezzanin, whom he first met ‘on a sunny afternoon in Geneva at a dinner under the oak trees’. Fittingly, nature became a recurring theme in their relationship and this garden project. 

Working against a backdrop of the Frey Architectes-designed contemporary addition to the existing chalet structure, Dhont composed an arrangement that promotes ‘a new spirit of art, nature and balance’. About two thirds of the 1.86-acre garden are dedicated to greenery and ‘reforestation’, including a leafy, undulating landscape and ponds to attract wildlife. 

Among Handlbauer’s wishes for the garden was for it to feel ‘natural and easy-going’, and Dhont obliged. The result is a seemingly ‘unstructured’ garden that combines an organic feel with the right elements and proportions to cater to a range of functions – from swimming to entertaining and relaxing. ‘Architectural gardens are about framing the landscape, but here we worked differently. The void is the architecture, the hard surfaces we use are like spaceships floating in nature,’ says Dhont. He cites creatives such as British gardener Russell Page and Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa as sources of inspiration. 

Oak, pine, black alder, and evergreen shrubs, such as yew and holly, are key features in the garden. Accents are created by cherry, alder buckthorn, lilac, chequer and hornbeam trees. A sculpture by artist Gianni Motti sits among the plants. A swimming pool that Dhont designed together with the architects in Vals stone, next to a terrace made of local granite, completes the design, adding a cooling water element to the soft, verdant landscape.

INFORMATION

erikdhont.com

A version of this article appears in the November 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*271), now on newsstands – subscribe today.

Located in the heart of the Highland city of Inverness, The Gathering Place is a minimalist yet powerful gesture on the Scottish landscape. Bridging design, architectural gardens, landscape and art, the piece has just been unveiled by a creative team composed of artists Sans Façon and architects KHBT, alongside the City of Inverness. It creates not only an elegant architectural landmark for the region, but also a place for gathering and contemplation for locals and visitors alike. 

The piece, all sweeping curves and tactile materiality, can be found along the banks of the iconic River Ness, conversing with the water and nature beyond. Partly nestled into the riverbank, and partially floating above the water, the design aims to reconnect ‘the city with the river, drawing out its stories, engendering a sense of place and creating access to the river', explain its creators. 

This is not just an opportunity to create a beautiful, sculptural piece, set against the green nature of its context. It is also an attempt to symbolically and practically ‘revisit the river's social role’, say the team, celebrating both the Ness and the city. Highlighting this approach, the structure takes the visitor on a jounrey through the Scottish landscape, transforming from a bench, to a pathway, a platform and eventually, a pier or a bridge-like experience. 

The Gathering Place is made out of Clashach stone, which can be sourced from the region, putting the emphasis once more on locality and community. Not only it's a beautiful material but it’s also intrinsically connected to the region. The piece was also constructed locally by Beauly-based company Simpson Builders. 

‘After the intense research, including the collection of many stories from the people of Inverness, it felt appropriate to create a minimal gesture that enhances the notion of the river being the main actor, whilst creating a tangible connection between the spectators from both embankments,' says KHBT director and Berlin International University of Applied Science professor Karsten Huneck.

INFORMATION

khbt.eu

sansfacon.org

The first thing you see when you arrive in Milton Keynes by train is Station Square. Framed on three sides by long reflective glass buildings, this expansive plaza and transport hub had, until recently, lacked a sense of purpose, density or softness. Yet this is about to change, as a new installation titled The Modernist Glade – part temporary public art, part architectural pavilion project, and part experimental urban renewal intervention with a nod to sustainability – promises to subvert the idea of a glade and apply it to the city's heart in the shape of an urban garden. 

‘[Station Square] is a very large, very open and also quite empty space,' says Takeshi Hayatsu, founding director of London-based Hayatsu Architects. He is one third of the team, who, alongside artist Tue Greenfort and curator and producer Aldo Rinaldi, was commissioned by Milton Keynes Council and Milton Keynes Development Corporation to revitalise this important but under-used urban space. 

The architects soon realised that the key to making Station Square a place you want to spend time in was to create a series of smaller spaces within it and dedicate each one to different activities and ideas. They subdivided the square into a grid in which they placed 48 planters containing different types of tree at regular 10m intervals, installed four pavilions designed for different activities and functions, and reorganised existing street furniture to respect the new modular layout. 

‘The idea of the grid was a reference to the radical grid the city was originally planned on back in the 1960s,’ says Hayatsu. ‘We asked ourselves how we could adapt it to the 21st century.' The answer was make nature the underlying theme – in this case trees, fungi and insects – and choose materials accordingly. ‘20th century modernism was pretty much about concrete and steel, so our Modernist Glade is full of timber, stone and recycled or natural materials.' The trees are also a nod to the utopian ideals of this ‘new’ city and the millions of trees planted upon its founding in 1967; a staggering 25 per cent of the city is now covered in trees, some 22 million in total.

The impact of this project is subtle, partly because the trees are young and starting to lose their leaves and not every element of the plan is completed or has bedded in. But early signs are promising and the intent and ambition is bold and pioneering. The main pavilion is a freestanding square structure with arresting mushroom bags hanging from the ceiling, a table resting on slim and knobbly tree branches, and a pleasing geometry to its wood architecture. The stretched canvas on the roof and walls (which can be removed to make the pavilion entirely open) bring to mind the paper used in Japanese shoji screens. The large stones that this and the other structures rest on are deceptive. They are arresting and beautiful in their own right but also anchor the structures in place with the help of hidden stainless steel dowels.

‘We see this pavilion as a laboratory where you can come together and make things,' says Greenfort, who has added a layer of ecological urgency and depth to the project, and is curating the two-year programme to activate the square. Workshops will be held on how to grow mushrooms or make baskets out of the willow harvested from the screens installed elsewhere, for example.

Two main lawns that were empty have been transformed too. Sections have been ‘rewilded’ so that the wild flowers, plants and fungi can attract bees and insects that are in steady decline. One lawn houses a timber screen and canopy for screenings, while the other will host a bee hive (the bees will enter the hive via a tactile ceramic flower with an opening where the stamens should be, also designed by Greenfort).

Eventually, fungi will fill the tree planters and cover the locally sourced log seating that is dotted around the project too. The most interesting part of a fungus is not the umbrella-shaped ‘flower’ you see above ground, explains Greenfort, but the subterranean network of roots or mycelia that allow trees and fungus to communicate and exchange nutrients and chemicals. He likens this to an underground internet, but it has also been called the plant version of mutual aid.

It’s this symbiotic relationship that The Modernist Glade hopes to celebrate over the next two years, on the one hand exploring how we can cohabit with other species and live more sustainably alongside them in the urban world, but on the other, and on a more pragmatic level, testing ways the square can become a greener, more pleasant and liveable part of the city.

INFORMATION

hayatsuarchitects.com

tuegreenfort.com

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the critically acclaimed Canadian landscape architect, has passed in Vancouver at the age of 99. Oberlander's long career was filled with impressive highlights, From being taught by modernist architects such as Walter Gropius at Harvard, to working with Louis Kahn, Arthur Erickson, Shigeru Ban and Moshe Safdie on a string of thoughtful, life-enriching projects – her work and legacy on the value of green expanses and the importance of public space will remain important and influential for generations to come. 

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander was born in Mülheim to a Jewish-German family, who fled the Nazi regime and emigrated to America, when she was 18. She studied landscape architecture at Smith College and then Harvard, marrying fellow Harvard Design School student planner Peter Oberlander. The couple moved to Vancouver in 1953 for a job opportunity, where they stayed, Oberlander soon becoming prolific in the residential landscaping scene. Larger-scale, public works are a significant part of her portfolio too. Her two big Vancouver projects with Erickson – Robson Square and the Museum of Anthropology (pictured below) – are probably her best known.

Oberlander was also ‘an early proponent of rewilding, community consultation, pedestrian-friendly accessibility and creative playgrounds for children,' writes Hadani Ditmars, who interviewed the landscape architect at her 1970 Vancouver post-and-beam home, designed with architect Barry Downs, in Vancouver for the May 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*230). ‘[Now] when many of the sustainable practices Oberlander espoused for years have become mainstream, she is still an unstoppable force of nature, working on several projects and doing advocacy work.'

Her honours tell a story of a great mind that spearheaded change and championed excellence in her profession. She won the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s 2011 Prix du XXe siècle, she is the recipient of the 2012 American Society of Landscape Architects Medal, and became a Companion of the Order of Canada. She was also recently awarded the Freedom of the City Award by the City of Vancouver – it is the city’s highest honour. A new International Landscape Architecture gong by The Cultural Landscape Foundation was recently been created in her honour too - the Oberlander Prize. It will be announced every two years, starting 2021.

‘My passion is to be with nature and introduce people to it from all levels of society,’ she said, in the same 2018 piece. ‘I believe in the therapeutic effects of greenery on the human soul.’

‘Birch looks like a hotel but feels like a festival,' goes the new creative escape's website, and in designing it, architectural collective Red Deer, placed that slogan at the heart of their approach. Soft-opening during the pandemic and launching its brand new, blue-green minimalist lido and surf shack-style poolside bar this month, Birch is a hospitality offering centering on a sense of retreat and community, and a holistic environment that offers calm and flexibility, a stone's throw from London. 

‘We tried to approach the idea of a hotel differently, more like a start up, and not like the typical grade II listed heritage hotel, where you focus on updating the finishes. Instead we embraced seeing a bit of decay and wear, there is a really nice contrast between the old and new objects you put into these heritage spaces,' explains the Red Deer co-founder Ciarán O'Brien. 

The architecture team, led by co-founders O'Brien, Lionel Real de Azúa and Lucas Che Tizard, looked at what the site – a Georgian, Grade II* listed mansion and estate in Hertfordshire, a short drive from London – offered for inspiration. Working with the building's bones and in collaboration with Birch founders Chris King and Chris Penn, they transformed it into a ‘next-generation escape,' composed of the main building and a selection of different structures and areas around it – a family, part of which is the gleaming new lido. 

‘We approached the lido in the same way we approached everything else at Birch; challenging wastefulness and uniformity. We found out that there was supposed to be a hidden ice skating rink somewhere on the estate but we couldn't find it, so we designed the lido as though we had uncovered it like archeology in the ground. We wanted to rethink everything, we didn’t want to do a pool that looks like a pool. Instead its low and full of pastel colours found in nature,' says O'Brien.

The calming, minimalist lido environment reflects the serene atmosphere favoured in the bedrooms, where the absence of televisions and clutter ensure a restful stay. ‘In the bedrooms we wanted to offer space and room to breathe. There are no TVs or dominating wardrobes in the Birch rooms, just a few simple moves: a huge bed, colours across the walls and then we focused on deconstructing a series of valet stands as it’s a standard object you immediately use when you go into a hotel room,' adds O'Brien. ‘We collaborated with local designer Jan Hendzel Studio, ceramicist Emma Louise Payne, designer Charlotte Kidger and metalsmith Lucie Naujalis on the stands and they give each room a sculptural focal point.'

The interior is populated with few, carefully selected objects and furniture, from contemporary craft items to vintage finds and 20th century Modern pieces. For example, Payne created bespoke handmade details, such as a range of glazed porcelain pendants, for the project. Birch and its new minimalist lido are conceived to combine wellness, craft, design, and a prevailing sense of relaxation through architecture and nature. ‘The whole place is light and informal. there's space to grow,' concludes O'Brien. 

INFORMATION

birchcommunity.com

reddeer.co.uk

A house insired by the neo-noir 2016 Tom Ford film Nocturnal Animals, Maple Place perches on a hillside of West Vancouver. Created by HLYNSKY + DAVIS Architects, interior designer Sophie Burke Design and landscape architect Paul Sangha, this Canadian home was commissioned by a private client with a vision to build a home that would feel like a natural part of the landscape but also draw on cultural references and the modernist architecture of the 20th century. 

The architects composed a material palette that creates a discourse with the surrounding nature – using natural stone and wood, while grounding the structure with a elegant, yet solid base of cascading paved terraces and wide steps inbetween its lush gardens. A strong sense of indoor/outdoor living was important, as was making sure the surrounding forest and mountains in the distance were beautifully framed through strategically placed openings at every turn. 

Helping to achieve this, ‘the kitchen extends outdoors with an adjacent cooking area on a covered deck,' explain the architects. ‘The bathtub in the master ensuite sits almost outdoors, flanked by large opening glass doors and a screened courtyard. The transom windows at one end provide complete privacy while framing the mountain scenery. In the family room, the window sill is set at the height of the green roof so that the foreground is a garden with a mountain backdrop. Meanwhile, the cars and garage remain hidden.'

The landscaping and garden design around the house were critical in creating the right base and atmosphere for this home. ‘The client pulled inspiration for this project from the house used in the film Nocturnal Animals,' says Paul Sangha Creative's founder, landscape architect Paul Sangha. ‘Similar to the film’s setting, the home is situated upon a stunning bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.'

Connecting with the site's existing terrain informed the landscaping decisions, so that the result feels natural and entirely of-its-place. Taking advantage of the spaces and connections created by the architecture of the home was a key goal, explains the landscape architect. At the same time, the team wanted to create ‘a magnificent arrival experience by revealing the architectural design incrementally through the use of strategically placed foliage and landscape elements.' The client's love for South California life was another critical factor in the design decisions.

‘On the South side of the property, which receives greater solar exposure, a sun-loving garden was created with a unique blend of textures and colours that pop against the exposed concrete of the home without overpowering,' continues Sangha. ‘Soft colours – the silvery green of the solitary Olive Tree, dusty rose blooms of Panicle Hydrangea popping up behind the stairs leading to the upper deck, pale purple spikes of lavender – were used to avoid harsh varietals that might steal attention from the remarkable architecture of the house or the stunning the ocean view. The result is a calming simplicity that provides a nod to California.'

Linking the ocean and the mountains, the blue water views and surrounding green forest, as well as physical and cultural references of past and present, no doubt Maple Place is a showstopper; a bridge between the Canadian and Californian coastal landscapes that birthed it.

INFORMATION
paulsangha.com

hlynsky.ca

sophieburkedesign.com

Craft, history and nature are at the core of this intruiging industrial conversion in the inner city suburb of Fitzroy in Melbourne. Designed by Architects EAT, headed by Eid Goh and Albert Mo, the home comprises a masterfully converted old warehouse and adjacent workers’ cottage that have been transformed into a modern, domestic space, all behind a green-covered, tall brick wall.

Fittingly named Stockroom, the house keeps its original industrial shell, reading from the outside as a warehouse and small cottage building with a courtyard and small patios engulfed in greenery. The interior, however, was completely redesigned. ‘[It] is anecdotally influenced by Venetian and Brazilian modernism, perhaps due to travel to these locations,’ say the architects. 

Indeed, the main circulation spine of the complex, was treated by the team as a Venetian via, offering routes through spaces and views across the interior and out towards the courtyards, rich with vegetation and climbing planting. This feeling of history and patina is enhanced by the maintaining of original exteriors and the boundary brick wall, which was left exposed. 

The main warehouse building hosts the open-plan living space on the ground level, with the childrens’ sleeping area upstairs. Meanwhile, the parents’ quarters sit in the cottage section, within a separate master suite. 

Old meets new everywhere, but the overall feeling is that this is a home that has always been there. Tactile materials, natural colours and surfaces come together in a whole that invites the touch and feels comfortable and welcoming. A concrete core at the centre of the warehouse houses the staircase that leads up to the timber-balustraded upper level. The same core also cleverly extends to form and support other functions around it, including the utility spaces, such as the laundry, bathrooms and storage. 

Existing materials and the nature around the site played a key role in the overall palette of this industrial conversion, explain the team: ‘Elaborately detailed balustrades are testimony of the skill of the carpenter and wood turner, while materially referencing the 150-year-old oregon timber trusses overhead, and paying homage to the loved lemon scented gum tree in the back garden.'

INFORMATION
eatas.com.au

Mizzi Studio has completed a series of architectural kiosks within London's Royal Parks, with its latest structure unveil near Buckingham Palace. The brass tubular food and coffee kiosk is the latest in a family of fluid, nature-inspired designs that the studio's founder, Jonathan Mizzi, embarked on in 2017. With the final piece to the puzzle ticked off, and restrictions lifting in the British capital, there's no better time to go and explore. 

The kiosk near Buckingham Palace

The kiosk features a 360-degree sculptural canopy that ‘swells outwards like a tree’s crown', say the architects. Sinuous and flowing, the design takes organic shapes that feel at home in the green landscape of the parks. ‘The richness of the brass kiosk echoes Colicci’s dedication to quality food and drink and highlights our belief in the relationship between excellence in design and service – each positively reinforcing one another,' says artisan food and drinks brand Colicci director, Rob Colicci. ‘We look forward to seeing the kiosks being enjoyed by park-goers once again come the summer months, uniting families through their warmth and magnetism.'

How did the project come about?

The series began when Collici approached Mizzi Studio some five years ago, to create Serpentine Coffee House. Its completion came with the design of nine more kiosks that were meant to be installed on various locations across the Royal Parks. In October 2018, the roll out began, slowly and steadily leading up to today's culmination point – the launch of the Buckingham Gate pavilion in St James' Park, the largest in the range. 

The kiosks were created to replace a number of older, tired structures in place, and to update the visitor experience at the famous London parks. They share a similar aesthetic, while being adapted to fit each of their respective sites. 

What the architects say

Engaging with modern crafts and contemporary forms was important for the design team, but responding to the Grade I listed landscape was equally key to this high profile commission. ‘Mizzi Studio has designed each kiosk to sit sympathetically in its environment,' say the architects. ‘The freestanding kiosks are conceived as a family of individual curvaceous structures with a graceful tree-like canopy that unites their design language. The initial kiosks are clad in hand ‘steam-bent' English oak timber, developed in collaboration with British designer and maker Tom Raffield.'

INFORMATION 

mizzi.co

To say that the Enchantment Resort, located in Sedona, Arizona, makes the most of its natural surroundings is a bit of an understatement. The resort, which is located amongst the dramatic red rock cliffs of Boynton Canyon, not only offers guests sublime views, but also outdoor activities and the opportunity to traverse its dramatic landscape with 300 miles worth of nature trails at their disposal. And its newest addition, a visitor centre and social hub known as the Trail House, has opened.

Designed by the New York City-based firm Gluckman Tang Architects, the 4,000 sq ft structure serves as a gallery space, outdoor adventure store and a full-service bike shop, all elegantly rolled into one. 

Located along an existing path in the resort, Trail House is both a destination of its own as well as a stopping point on the trail. Boasting an extended trellis, made from weathered cedar and corten steel, which begins above the outdoor patio and continues through the building, serving as its main circulation spine, the house is a grounding melange of adobe brick and red-rock coloured stucco boxes, that dialogue naturally with the dramatic landscape beyond.

‘Trail House acts as a gateway to the landscape, environment, and history of the area,’ says Dana Tang, partner of Gluckman Tang. ‘It stands in honour and celebration of the place. Rather than locate the building next to an existing pedestrian path, we located and oriented Trail House so the path runs right through the building, signifying that it is not itself the destination.’

The house has been designed around the existing greenery and topography of the site, including a 50 ft Arizona sycamore tree that was protected in place during the construction process. Gluckman Tang collaborated with Colwell Shelor Landscape Architects to introduce native plantings and create natural water catchment areas that offer sustainable protection from flooding while preventing erosion due to heavy rains. One such bioswale is located under the bridge where guests enter the building, allowing them a moment to appreciate the natural feature.

‘The design involved preserving and salvaging existing native trees, including several 30-50’ Arizona Sycamores. Some were moved during construction and replanted in strategic areas to maximize shade,’ shares Tang. ‘The largest of the Arizona Sycamores was protected in place and serves as the centerpiece of the outdoor bike gathering area, framing a dutch door that connects guests directly with the mechanics in the bike shop. An oversized corten steel rain scupper extending the full height of the building creates a waterfall during monsoon season and channels rainwater into landscaped bio-swales that filter water and prevent destructive stormwater runoff.’

Inside, the building seamlessly brings together the various outdoor activities and sense of nature the resort offers. There is a full-service bike shop, which features exposed staple trusses, a plywood ceiling, a raw steel counter and black pegboard where tools are displayed; and a retail store, where the trellis, topped by peeled pine logs known as latillas, serves as a dynamic connective thread through the space. The main attraction however, is the eye-catching gallery space, also known as the Map Room, which puts the region’s trails, natural features and cultural history on display. Featuring a 12 foot video wall and interactive map, the spacious, sky-lit room pays tribute to Boynton Canyon.

‘The overall concept was to create a ‘trail' along which the map room, retail and bike shop are surprise discoveries, similar to the experience of the nature trails that the building highlights,’ explains Tang. ‘The Map Room, with its exaggerated height and large skylight, gives significance to the trails and other wonders of the area, which are presented in trail maps and graphics printed on cork and integrated into the pine-log walls, and a 3D topographic model. This elevated, gallery-like space, with filtered light from above, provides a dramatic setting within which to plan an outdoor adventure.’

Finished with pigmented concrete floors, the House is a seamless bridge between the indoors and outdoors in more ways than one. ‘We used materials that already exist on property, and we rendered them in a simple, rustic way, reducing them to their essential character - concrete with local stone for the floor, stucco and adobe brick for walls, corten steel for columns holding up a simple wood roof structure, clad on the underside with peeled pine logs,’ Tang concludes. ‘The same materials are used on the interior and the exterior.’

INFORMATION
gluckmantang.com

Transformed from post-industrial site to wildlife paradise, Smith Oaks Sanctuary is a lush, leafy landscape in High Island, Texas. The green expanse has just been enhanced with the light, expert touch of internationally acclaimed landscape architecture firm SWA Group and the industrial reuse designs of New York- and Houston-based architecture studio Schaum/Shieh. Central to the concept is a raised walkway that allows for birdwatching and experiencing the striking nature from the tree canopy level. 

The Kathrine G McGovern Canopy Walkway is a 700ft-long, 18ft-high boardwalk ‘that elevates then threads visitors up into and through a canopy refuge long-known to the birding community as an important stopover for migratory birds', explain the team. Made out of wood and weathered steel pipes, the structure nods to the site’s historic oil and gas infrastructure. Robust, but also cutting a light figure, the walkway was designed to perfection for the sanctuary's ecology. It leads to a vantage point that allows visitors to observe migratory birds. 

Meanwhile, remnants of the site's industrial past enrich the environment's architectural landscape. A salt dome, for example, rises and protects the surrounding marshland from tides and storm surge. More existing abandoned infrastructure was put to good use, reinvented for the purposes of the sanctuary.

Enter Schaum/Shieh, which transformed a 1930s oil-extraction concrete-and-brick pump house into a visitor centre. The historic brick structure was thoroughly cleaned and exposed, creating an almost-minimalist, utilitarian pavilion for information and regrouping. A smaller, new-build, gable-roofed structure nearby serves as the park's restrooms. Its gentle green colour allows it to blend with its surroundings. 

‘Today, High Island offers a new perspective for birders, where the productivity of its land was once measured in barrels,' says the team. ‘While Texas has a spotty history when it comes to understanding its scarred landscapes, Canopy Walk at High Island offers a site with layers of history that collide to support a unique ecology, especially conducive to the avian and their birder fans.'

INFORMATION

schaumshieh.com
swagroup.com

Brown & Brown Architects' radical extension to a traditional Highlands house is set amidst a spectacular Scottish landscape. Designed by Andrew and Kate Brown and their team, Lower Tullochgrue House is located in the Cairngorms National Park. The new structure replaces a tumbledown barn to the west of the original house, on a lower part of the site.

The original plan was to restore and refurbish this barn, but the design evolved into an all-new structure, using as many of the materials as possible and re-aligning the new accommodation to better suit the views across the National Park and the Spey Valley.

Using a palette of reclaimed local natural stone, natural slate, Siberian larch timber and blackened stainless steel, the extension is mounted upon a stone plinth and then cantilevered out above the slope, with just a slender V-shaped pillar for support. The traditional underpinnings contrast strongly with the glass and steel construction set above it, and the whole ensemble is tied into the existing house by the addition of a pitched slate roof. 

The masonry plinth contains a garage and story area, as well as a secondary entrance to the house, while the cantilever doubles up as a carport, sized to accommodate the clients’ 1960s Ford Falcon. By raising the main living space up above the ground, a new axis is created through the old house to the extension, with a glazed link joining the two. This leads to a new living room with a kitchen and utility space beyond.

The external focus is on the north-easterly views with a wall of sliding glass and a terrace running the full length of the structure. The dining table is placed at the heart of the extension, with far-reaching dual aspect views.  

The project also includes a new, separate guest and games block as well as the internal refurbishment of the original house. The number of people using the house changes constantly, so a special cascade air-source heat-pump system has been installed, allowing the building to be divided into heating zones when it is only partially occupied.

High levels of insulation further reduce the environmental impact of this Highlands house. Brown & Brown specialises in distinctive, sustainable private houses, accommodating both Scottish vernacular design and contemporary forms and materials. With studios in Strathdon and Inverness, the award-winning firm was founded in 2010.

INFORMATION
Brown & Brown Architects

Gillian Hayes, Dapple Photography

Architect Bartosz Haduch and his Krakow-based architecture firm NArchitekTURA have just completed two projects for the Jewish community in Oświęcim – the Polish city where the concentration camp of Auschwitz was located during WW2. One of the two is a sculptural piece located in the city's memorial park. The other is the city's Jewish Centre, an education and exhibition facility that honours and tells the story of the region's Jewish population. Both works were a direct commission from the Auschwitz Jewish Center. 

The memorial sits on the grounds of a temple, which was destroyed a little over 80 years ago. The design, a composition of seemingly randomly placed stone surfaces, symbolises ‘the ruins of the now defunct Great Synagogue (1863-1939) and the paths of life of the multicultural community that were once criss-crossing in this place,' explains Haduch.

The project is built in gray sandstone slabs, which feature irregular cuts and scrapes on their surface – a sourced industrial waste material. The patterns not only offer a striking visual effect, but they also hint at the story the memorial tells. 

‘The criss-crossing cut-in-stone lines take on a symbolic dimension,' says Haduch. ‘Without any clear beginning or end, they seem to be heading towards infinity. This dense network of lines evokes the paths of human life, that sometimes just intersect, and at other times connect to go on together.' Fittingly, the memorial is titled ‘Paths of Life'.

The Jewish Centre, works on which began back in 2014, was completed in stages over the past six years with the final touches added this autumn. Involving the renovation and adaptation of a cluster of historical buildings in the heart of town, the space features a carefully planned exhibition and a series of triangular structures – ‘prisms,' as Haduch describes them – made out of copper and rusty metal that suggest directions for sightseeing and routes through the displays. Drawing on natural materials, the Jewish heritage and a sensitive approach to cultural and historical nuances, the design feels a fitting ‘twin' to the memorial's solution. 

‘Who knows, maybe after a few hundred years time, this place will become a mysterious archeological site?' muses Haduch. ‘After all, throughout centuries, humanity has been learning about ancient times from illustrations and texts immortalized in stone. I often wonder how will be interpreted in the distant future the message hidden in forty pieces of the Memorial Park?'

Information

narchitektura.pl

A bright red system of looping, elevated walkways has appeared near Bangkok. Installated in the hills west of Pattaya on the gulf of Thailand for the annual Wonderfruit festival (this year running 4 December 2020 – 17 January 2021), the striking piece is the brainchild of Thai architect Boonserm Premthada and his practice, the Bangkok Project Studio. It was conceived as an art piece to raise awareness surrounding everyday nature, and in particular, small planting that often gets overlooked – such as grass. 

‘The Walk is an elevated walkway above the grass, conceived with the purpose of helping humans realise the importance of a small plant like grass, and pay attention to trivial details around them that are usually neglected,' explains Premthada. ‘The project is to wake up the spirit of a place to make people aware of its natural beauty and the meaning of festivities, environmental conservation, culture, and art.'

The floating structure is composed of eight interlocking elevated walkways, raising up from the ground like bridges in looping formations that, painted an eye-catching red set against the green grass, present a graphically striking result. Walking on it, people can enjoy the view, focus on the grass below or the green expanses in the distance and allow their thoughts to float too. 

The project makes use of thin steel rods the size of the stem of Napier grass (the super grass growing in the area). The seemingly delicate, yet robust material hints at the power common grass has and its important role in our ecosystem. The system is further supported by steel beams and a small reinforced concrete base, buried into the land. 

There are plans for The Walk to remain in place and change the experience it offers as the grass grows up to the pathway level. ‘The Walk at Moobaan Wonder will be one of the experiences that inspire people to appreciate the natural ambiance that varies with different festivals and seasons, and to look back on the details once overlooked along the way,' says Premthada. ‘Walking is a natural human movement, like fish swimming in the river, birds flying in the sky. The Walk is a constant reminder for humans to notice these little things which from now on will no longer be overlooked.' 

INFORMATION

bangkokprojectstudio.co

Located in South Cambridge, this subtle yet luxurious home – the renovation and extension of an existing Victorian semi-detatched property – is the brainchild of London architect Neil Dusheiko. The project, named Sun Slice House, was conceived around a meticulously designed extension and includes the expanded living spaces, but also adds a rich garden and a chic private spa in a separate building within it. 

The clients spend a considerable amount of time at their residence, as both adults work there permanently and their three children are home-schooled. It's a set up that works particularly well in these pandemic times, when more and more of us seek designs that encourage home-working arrangements. 

‘We wanted the extension to feel like it was enveloping the existing home, creating a new layer around the older shell of the house so that they would read together,' says Dusheiko. ‘We also wanted to design the house from the inside out, where the form of the extension would be created by a combination of the solving environmental issues [solar and thermal] as well as dealing with the practicalities of everyday life from parents who work from home to home-schooling children.'

With that in mind, the architects worked closely with their clients to determine the best spatial expression for their needs. Creating a dedicated area for leisure and exercise was key, for example. Dusheiko and his team obliged and drafted a lush, green garden for ample outdoors space (featuring work by landscape designer Jane Brockbank), and created a brand new outbuilding at the back, to house a gym, sauna and spa area.

The minimalist spa annex acts as a ‘retreat' for the parents and offers a much needed breakout area when needed. Meanwhile, a large, open plan family room in the main house is a light-filled flexible space spanning sitting, dinning and kitchen. Timber and neutral colours create a calming and easily adaptable environment. Skylights and expansive glazing bathe the interiors in natural light. 

The rear extension features slim, yellow hued, handcrafted Petersen Kolumba bricks, which lend texture and natural tone to the new structure, helping it blend harmoniously with the more natural surroundings of the garden.

INFORMATION

neildusheiko.com

In the outskirts of Doha, nestled low, next to soaring landmark architecture such as OMA's National Library and Qatar Foundation Headquarters, sits a new green, open space. Designed by Aecom, Oxygen Park was conceived as an important 'green lung' for Education City, the Qatari capital's university and learning quarter. 

Sitting in the heart of a campus with students from over 50 countries, the park was designed to not only provide an urban connection between different parts of the wider area, but also create a verdant landscape for people to walk, exercise and rest in.  

Helping the health and wellbeing of its users and the local community were a key goal for the design team. Aecom responded by creating an area that unites provisions for different kinds of activities in a carefully composed whole. There's a track for running, and bespoke benches to rest, open areas and subterranean pitches to play and sheltered parts to hide from the region's intense summer sun. The park is a composition of series of sub-areas, open and closed, green and built. 

‘From a conceptual point of view, designing a park is not that different to a building,' explains Aecom creative director and architect Erik Behrens. ‘It starts with a programme and idea driving the logic of form and organization. Parks are inevitably outdoors, and they are always in a particular geography, they each have very different climates and temperatures and are bound to ecological processes.'

This, Behrens, acknowledges is also true for buildings, and research and open mind in both cases is key. ‘In the case of Oxygen Park, we spent over a week in the desert learning about the principles of dynamic land formations and the beauty of wind-eroded rocks. In combining this with the programmatic components and vegetation, the design of this park emerged,' he continues. 

Looking to the Qatari natural landscape for clues was critical. ‘We drew our inspiration from the wind-eroded rocks and fluid land formations in Qatar,' says Behrens. ‘Oxygen Park is designed to convey a beautiful and fluid surface; its undulations enable it to flow effortlessly as ground, roof, wall, and ceiling.'

At the same time, a specially designed night time lighting scheme makes the park available after dark too, when temperatures are cooler.

INFORMATION

aecom.com

Nestled in one of Paris’ oldest military sites, Lourcine barracks have been ambitiously transformed into a new site for Paris I Law University, complete with a library, lecture theatre, classrooms and offices. With the oldest parts dating back to 1875, the architects in charge of the project, the Paris-based Chartier-Dalix agency, have preserved the historic features of the site, while carefully adding in new elements with a strong contemporary feel.

Inside, natural light makes a wide corridor an ideal meeting space, where students and lecturers can gather around before heading to the other floors – all connected by a monumental, newly added, spiral staircase. The library’s reading rooms have been organised accordingly so that natural light can flood in through large original windows, creating a soothing atmosphere to those working on their academic studies.

Beyond a few modern and environmental upgrades, Chartier-Dalix has chiefly worked on clearing the heritage site, thus allowing its nineteenth century features and original splendour back into plain sight. Oak, glass and steel, added technical installations and industrial style made to measure pieces of furniture, bring the necessary contemporary touch to this renovation work, where old and new smoothly complement each other.

Outside, the grounds keep their original function as a central forecourt connecting a wooded garden and three buildings. Weathered steel panels pave the ground up to a gallery located at the lowest point of the site. Here what used to be an old car park has now been turned into a plush and stylish lecture theatre which can host up to 500 students.

Innovatively opening up to the surrounding existing buildings, the new Paris I Law University premises are an inspiring work of renovation, which brings a fresh architectural approach to this ever-changing south-eastern corner of the French capital city.

INFORMATION

chartier-dalix.com

On Manhattan’s southwest riverside, strange sculptural concrete shapes appear to be emerging from the depths. While works on site have now, understandably, paused, due to current health developments in New York, standing proud, about half way through construction, Heatherwick Studio's Little Island resembles an artist's mould or a curious industrial prototype, more than a conventional, empty, building site.

The project, won by the London-based studio following a design competition arranged by the Hudson River Park Trust and businessman and philanthropist Barry Diller, looks at creating a new pier, making use of the old wooden piles that stick out of the Hudson River – the structural remains of old piers, now destroyed. 

The new design adds new, concrete piles to create a raised platform that will merge a public space and a flexible, outdoors, performance venue. Rising up from the water, the piles expand, fusing together and forming a brand new topography; a park. In the same space, the project will contain an outdoor theatre for over 700 people, a smaller performance space for 200, a main space for 3,500 and several different pathways and viewing platforms. 

Greenery was an important element in the design and each of the some-280 piles contains a planter at their top. The team researched flora that is local to New York and can survive its hot summers and freezing winters and filled the planters with more than a hundred different species of indigenous trees and plants. 

‘[My team and I] wondered if the identity of our new park and performance space could emerge from the water, just like these structural piles, but without needing to add any slab on top,' says studio founder Thomas Heatherwick. ‘This idea evolved to take the new concrete piles that would be needed to connect to the granite at the base of the river, and to then continue them out of the water, extending skyward to raise sections of a generous green landscape with rich horticulture. Fusing at they meet, these 280 individual piles come together to form the undulating topography of the park, angled perfectly for performance and theatre spaces.'

At a time when open, public areas are more important than ever, Little Island is something to look forward to. At the start of the year, construction was on track for a 2021 opening.

INFORMATION

heatherwick.com

Junya Ishigami+Associates has won the inaugural Obel Award, in recognition of its Art Biotop Water Garden in the Nasu Mountains of the Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. Just as his Serpentine Pavilion closes in London, the Japanese architect was given €100,000 with the award at the Utzon Centre in Aalborg, Denmark, making the new prize Europe’s most lucrative architecture award. 

The awarding jury, chaired by Martha Schwartz of U.S. landscaping firm Martha Schwartz Partners and comprising Kjetil Trædal Thorsen of Snöhetta, Louis Becker of Henning Larsen, and Dr Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, a philosopher at the University of Munich, praised Ishigami’s approach of blending architecture, the landscape and art. This, they argued, manifested in the Art Biotop Water Garden, which saw 300 trees be transported from one island to another to create an oasis comprising small, shallow pools of water and meandering waterways nestled among an array of trees — all of which were meticulously observed and researched to ensure their ecological longevity. 

‘[This was] a project that creates a new environment based on the idea of understanding a landscape as architecture,' said Ishigami describing the project at the award’s ceremony. ‘The idea was to superimpose the water and the environment created by the trees [based on] the historical fact that the site was [previously used as rice] paddy fields… It was extremely important to create a new natural environment only by re-constructing natural elements that used to exist at the place, including trees, mosses,  grasses, stones, water and soil.'

Schwartz meanwhile added: ‘Ishigami’s architecture is the architecture of space, not of object. He discards the idea of architecture as a built, utilitarian structure by reversing the business-as-usual process, which is: building first, landscape second – if at all. Instead, with the project ‘Water Garden’, Ishigami leaves us wondering: is this architecture, landscape architecture, or art?'

So what is the Obel Award? You can be forgiven for not knowing (and forgive autocorrect for thinking you meant to type “Nobel”) — the architecture prize is new, set up by the Henrik Frode Obel Foundation after Obel died in 2014. It will be presented annually, with the aim of recognising ‘outstanding architectural contributions to human development all over the world,' taking into account projects including manifestos, masterplans, buildings, landscaping and even exhibitions from the last five years. Along with the cash prize, recipients will receive an artwork by Argentinian artist, Tomás Saraceno. A theme will be set by the jury for each award. ‘Welfare Through Architecture' was the theme for the Obel’s first year, aiming to focus on the transformative and social value of architecture. ‘I believe that in the future this Obel Award will become a tradition and a well-known award in the world,' added Ishigami. ‘In that sense, I would like to engage in working with architecture now with a refreshed mindset that can keep up with the development of this award,' said Ishigami at the award’s ceremony. ‘I believe that we architects today must comprehend architecture on a planetary scale, or rather on a natural scale, [compared] to the architects of yesterday who comprehended architecture on a city scale.'

INFORMATION

jnyi.jp

With his spiky UK pavilion for Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo, Thomas Heatherwick became one of the most sought-after designers in Asia. Mr He-si-wei-ke, as he is known, remains one of only a handful of recognised Western names in China, and his latest project, a spectacular new complex in Shanghai’s Moganshan district, is sure to seal his status as one of the UK’s most innovative architectural ambassadors.

The first phase of this mixed-use development for the Tian An China Investments Company is due for completion in May 2020. Set on a former industrial area in a bend of Suzhou Creek, with the low-level warehouse and factory conversions of the trendy M50 arts district to the south, the site is also home to that rare commodity in Shanghai: a woodland park.

It would have been a relatively simple matter to cram the project’s required 300,000 sq m floor area into a conventional tower. But Heatherwick’s desire to avoid a high-rise development looming over the M50’s converted warehouses demanded more imaginative thinking. The result is a tree-lined ‘mountain’ that wraps itself in the landscape and lifts trees to every level of the building. As Heatherwick describes it, this unique topography ‘knits the new with the old’.

Hundreds of concrete columns were used to distribute the weight of the trees to the ground. Widening at the top to form a huge planter containing one tree and a variety of hanging plants, each of the columns features horizontal ribbing that helps break up its height from a distance; up close, the structures resemble handcrafted pottery. Each column looks as if it is free-floating, but is actually tied back to support the floors and to provide seismic stability. This structural grid creates a stack of boxes that are staggered at each storey height to form multilayered terraces, indoor spaces and sky gardens with the planters rising just above head height to give the illusion of trees floating in mid-air.

Research on the column designs has taken two years; growing and selecting the correct locally sourced tree species (chosen for their hardiness at varying altitudes and wind speeds, but also for their colour variation) has taken even longer. With 60 per cent evergreen species, the mountain will always be lush and verdant, although natural seasonal variation will be reflected in the shape and form of deciduous varieties.

On the riverside elevation, the treescape spreads out at ground level to form a new public park and riverside walkway. On the south side, however, the idea was to cut away the monumental form as if slicing through the hillside, exposing an architectural section of the building. Billboard-size advertising opportunities have been formed in the exposed structural grid, interspersed with original paintings and graffiti art inspired by, and typically carried out by, the M50 creatives. The art continues in the cavernous interior of the building, with local and internationally renowned graffiti artists’ work on display.

A gamechanger for the designer, this project also demonstrates the importance of an enlightened client with a long-term commitment to architecture. The project’s second phase (including a 100m-tall tower) is not due to be completed before 2024, but 1000 Trees has already changed the urban landscape forever. 

As originally featured in the November 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*248) – on newsstands now

INFORMATION

heatherwick.com

As entire swathes of London are undergoing complete transformations – King’s Cross, Battersea and Nine Elms, and London City Island come to mind – developers are becoming increasingly aware of the need to address placemaking, in their effort to weave new buildings, residents and neighbourhoods into real, live hubs of activity and thriving parts of the metropolis. Greenwich Peninsula is raising the game in the field by commissioning architectural innovation leaders Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) to design a coherent public park for the area; and the result's first phase, The Tide, is launching to the public this weekend. 

Created by DS+R in collaboration with London based Neiheiser Argyros and landscape architects GROSS MAX, the project was conceived as a linear riverside park, connecting different parts of the Peninsula and helping with circulation flow, as well as providing outdoor space and greenery for users. The team behind The Tide call it a ‘cultural' park too, which makes sense, seeing as it is awash with art pieces by an impressive array of artists, including Damien Hirst, Allen Jones, Morag Myerscough, Heather & Ivan Morison, GERONIMO and Gaz Coombes.

The free-to-view outdoor art collection will change and evolve over time – routes and artworks will be spread across the landscape of native trees and throughout the impressive elevated walkways. At nine metre high, the walkways add a powerful vertical dimension to this park. 

‘The design of The Tide seeks to embed a new public realm into the daily rhythms of Greenwich Peninsula by layering together its currents of activity into a thickened landscape,’ says DS+R partner in charge of the project, Benjamin Gilmartin. ‘Visitors will experience the park from varying vantage points, from street level up to nine metre high elevated paths that weave through the site to plug into the existing network of leisure, art, and social life across neighbourhoods. Diverse programming along the way will act as islands that welcome the surges of commuters, visitors, cyclists and runners, while also providing intimate places of pause for contemplation, conversation, and people watching.’

This weekend marks the public launch of the exciting scheme's first phase – the very first one kilometre of the park’s planned landscaped route for art, running, walking and meditation – and the future will see another four kilometre route released in due course. Meanwhile, To launch The Tide, Greenwich Peninsula is hosting the Turning Tides Festival there, taking place from 5 – 7 and 12 – 14 July.

INFORMATION

dsrny.com

neiheiserargyros.com

Three miniature landscape settings have popped up in London, temporarily transforming pockets of pavement into public ‘parklets’. As part of the London Festival of Architecture, in partnership with the City of London Corporation, the three urban interventions have been designed by emerging London-based practitioners.

The parklets respond to a brief, which called competition entrants (of which there were more than 90) to reclaim unused spaces for pedestrians and showcase the potential of city streets as a connected urban park.

Architecture studio PARTI has placed its project, Rocks and Reeds, which takes the form of an undulating bench and reed sprouting sofa, on Billiter street. Construction rubble from demolition works taking place next door has been placed in a Corten steel cage which comprises the reed bed. The parklet helps shelter passers-by from over spilling dust and helps clean the air with the use of grasses that will grow to 1.5m high.

‘We wanted to create something playful, that hinted towards domestic furniture — turning a raw, heavy and austere palette of materials into something playful, welcoming and light,’ says Eleanor Hill, founding director of PARTI. ‘We want to bring back elements from the river and marshes to reconnect the passer-by to the story of London as a marshland.’

At Smithfield Market, pollution is also on the agenda. A decommissioned London black cab has been turned into a place for sitting, relaxing and playing by Fatkin architects in The London Cablet. The former diesel guzzling, noxious fume spewing machine now boasts plants that absorb pollution, subsequently providing an unexpected habitat for pollinating insects.

Lastly, artist Patrick McEvoy repurposed the kerb on St Martins le Grand as an open-air artist's studio and gallery. Drawing on the York stone slabs, which are commonly used as a canvas by London’s pavement artists, The Pavement Art Gallery, encourages those wandering by to draw upon York stone slabs that have been placed on three easels. The parklets will remain in London until September.

INFORMATION

londonfestivalofarchitecture.org

Husband and wife architects, Florian Baier and Nina Baier-Bischofberger, are both highly skilled parametric designers. But, unlike other parametricists, their mathematics tends to mirror nature’s geometries, which means that Baier Bischofberger Architects aim to make buildings that are not alien spaceships within the landscape, but rather form a liveable part of it. Their latest completed project is a family house near their hometown of Zurich.

The property is in Männedorf, on the edge of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. The clients are a couple with two young children, and the husband comes from a local family who own numerous plots in the area because they were once farmers there. The clients’ chosen plot used to be an orchard and sheep meadow. It sits on a little plateau with a gentle slope down towards the lake, offering panoramic views across the lake towards the Alps.

‘What is quite unusual, in the ever-densifying suburbs here, is that this family is not really interested in building on their land,’ says Nina. ‘They could have fully developed the plot, built apartments, and would never have had to work again,’ adds Florian. ‘But instead they decided to build something nice for themselves and keep that quality of wide-open space.’

The heart of both plot and house is a tree. For the garden, the architects enlisted the help of landscape architect Enzo Enea, who planted a large plane tree in the centre, around which the courtyard, and then the house itself, are wrapped. ‘Over time, the house and the tree will grow to become one,’ says Nina. The rest of the garden has been kept mostly as meadow, with some formal planting nearer to the house.

There were a number of considerations that helped define the asymmetric C-shape of the structure. One involved looking at the landscape and the internal zoning defined by paths across the property; another was the exposed position of the house because of the size of the grassy plot around it. ‘A courtyard house allows you to communicate around that courtyard and give you privacy as well,’ says Nina. The courtyard is open at the back, facing towards the lake and framing the view. The house also has an undulating roof, which reflects the surrounding landscape and ‘brings a more exciting shape into the interior’.

The house spans 350 sq m and contains three bedrooms with an additional one-bedroom guest apartment. There is no air-conditioning; passive shading, good insulation and natural ventilation keep the house cool in hot weather. There’s also a spiral staircase, almost baroque in its grandeur, and a double-height living space with a picture window. On the top floor, a large transparent net plays the role of a traditional balustrade, helping to maintain visual and spatial connections. A more secluded master bedroom looks across the lake to the mountains.

The main timber structure was prefabricated off-site and took about three weeks to erect. ‘The geometry is quite complicated,’ says Florian. ‘The carpenter used CNC milling machines to prepare everything, and an on-site 3D model was used to help assemble the pieces.’ The zigzag forms of the exposed laminated ash beams in the ceiling are a strong feature throughout. Their shape responds to the house’s complex geometry and allowed for triangulation of the roof structure so the architects could always work with flat planes.

The pattern of the spruce façade, treated to give the weathered silver sheen of older wood, is reminiscent of traditional barn cladding. Up close, the detailing is far from rustic – it’s immaculate Swiss precision, like the pockets on a perfectly tailored pinstriped suit. ‘It’s quite subtle and you don’t consciously notice it, but every angle is different, which means that, despite the fact the roof is undulating up and down, the cladding always meets at the roof line,’ says Florian. ‘It’s not just stuck on; it really reacts to the shape of the building.’

Another nod to the complex geometry of the house is the tessellated hexagonal European oak parquet flooring on the top level. ‘We saw this pattern in the shoe department of Selfridges in London years ago and loved it,’ says Nina. ‘And because this house is full of constantly changing angles, this is the perfect shape to accommodate that.’ Nina also came up with an interior palette of blue, green, aubergine, yellow and warm grey, and she chose many of the fabrics and furnishings. ‘It was important that these colours and shapes all fitted together because of the visual interconnectedness of the interior,’ she says.

The house is far more complex and high-tech than it looks. It also has a rich mix of materials, colours and textures flowing through its curvy spaces, but both aspects are executed in such a subtle way as to never feel overbearing. It is a fine example of parametrics being put to the service of the user, rather than just being there for visual effect. ‘People who have visited tell us that, although it is a big house, you never feel lost in it, which means we have achieved a good balance between intimacy and generosity of space,’ says Florian. ‘I think that’s quite a nice compliment.’ §

As originally featured in the December 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*237)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Baier Bischofberger Architects website