The suburban lawn is a landscape of domesticity, uniformity, and ecological cost. It embodies ideals of ownership and order while demanding intensive maintenance, irrigation, and chemical treatment. As a cultural signifier, it has become both a symbol of conformity and a target of critique in ecological discourse. The suburban lawn reveals the politics of everyday landscape at the scale of the parcel.
The essay argues that climate collapse pushes ownership into public responsibility and aesthetics into a medium of obligation. Landscape architecture can cultivate perceptual resilience, an ethics of design attuned to disorder, shared accountability, and the mutable nature of life.
The Krater Collective is a group of transdisciplinary artists who have decided to transform their professions, studios and working conditions in order to act as advocates for a self-determined ecosystem in an abandoned construction pit in Ljubljana. In Crafting Biodiversity, they expand over their fenced-off domain.
In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to […]
Anna Thurmayr and Dietmar Straub, operating from Winnipeg, Canada, approach landscape architecture less as a matter of monumental authorship and more as a form of quiet insurgency. Their practice resists spectacle, embracing instead small yet resonant gestures, collective processes, and deep attentiveness to context—whether planting 20,000 crocuses into a lawn or constructing an ephemeral Snow […]
Dušan Ogrin (1929-2019) was the pioneer of Slovenian landscape architecture. In 1972, he founded the Landscape Architecture programme at the University of Ljubljana. His seminal work The World Heritage of Gardens was published in 1993, so it was not too far-fetched to dedicate a book in his memory to the topic of gardens. The editors […]
The book by the legendary Danish landscape architect, Carl Theodor Sørensen (1893-1979), originally published in 1966, is for the first time published in English, with a foreword by Joost Emmerik and an Introduction by Lodewijk Wiegersma. Published by Blawdruk Publishers and Sonja Poll, the 39 Unusual Gardens for an Ordinary House is a landmark book […]
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]
Günther Vogt probably needs no introduction in our profession; he has been an important practitioner for a couple of decades now, appreciated globally for his rich, non-linear and adventurous design approach. Initially, his education was more in the direction of botany. He later shifted to landscape architecture by studying in Rapperswil, Switzerland. After his study […]
Sarah Cowles of Ruderal presents their design for the Betania Garden near Tbilisi, Georgia, which was awarded LILA 2023 Special Mention in the Garden category. We start the discussion with an update on Arsenal Oasis, another LILA-winning project from 2021 (See the presentation). For the Betania Garden, the LILA 2023 jury wrote: At first glance, […]
»Paradigm shift« has been, for at least a decade now, one of the most used phrases in landscape architecture. We use it mainly to address the need to focus on design with natural processes in mind. This is important as it concerns our core values, attitude towards nature, the understanding of natural processes and the […]
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