Krater includes no landscape architects and follows no formal landscape architecture plan. Yet it is an intervention in landscape that stands as a provocative inquiry into the status of abandoned plots embedded within the urban fabric. The project poses fundamental questions: is a site truly ‘neglected’ if a thriving biotope has already taken hold? Could such a space, in its self-organized vitality, already constitute a form of an urban park? How to organize the social dimension? Krater unfolds as an expedition into landscape itself—an open-ended investigation in which fragmented architectural elements function as instruments of observation, experiment, and reflection. The site operates as a living laboratory, challenging conventional practices of open space production and the disciplinary boundaries of landscape architecture. It addresses relevant uncertainties the Anthropocene entails, engaging critically with issues of multi-species coexistence and the contested notion of environmental harmonization.

At a time when landscape architecture often seeks to simulate nature through aesthetic approximation or even mimicry, Krater seems oblivious to such representational impulses. Its proposition is radical in its restraint: rather than imposing form, it frames this ‘third landscape’ as a space of ecological processes, social encounter and experiment, revealing alternative logics of co-inhabitation, agency and design—logics that may become increasingly relevant as landscape architecture confronts its own ecological, ethical and epistemological limits.

– from the award statements