2025 Recognitions
Tuesday, 24 June 2025 – The jury (Maria Goula, Sotiria Kornaropoulou, François Vadepied, Martin Rein-Cano and Zaš Brezar) selected the projects for the 10th edition of LILA. The editors of Landezine selected the 2025 Honour Award, Office Award and Portfolio Award for Students and Young Professionals. See the award statements below.
LILA 2025 Honour Award
Günther Vogt
The winner of the 2025 Honour Award is Günther Vogt (LI, CH), recognised for his distinct and enduring position in contemporary landscape architecture. Since establishing his practice 25 years ago—following his departure from the office of Kienast Vogt after the passing of Dieter Kienast—Vogt has consistently shaped an approach that operates beyond disciplinary conventions and resists simple classifications.
His process-oriented practice unfolds through disciplined observation, investigative patience, research-informed inquiry, driven by an eclectic curiosity that draws simultaneously from scientific knowledge and artistic sensibility — an attitude that neither reduces landscape to strictly formal composition nor to merely utilitarian topography, but treats it as a carefully assembled field of fragments, traces, and negotiations. In Vogt’s projects, geology, ecology, climate, cultural traces, and infrastructures are curated as “gestures” — neither fully determined nor finalised. Without collapsing into a single narrative, they form stratified and open-ended spatial constructs that resist closure and spread beyond the visible.
In a time when mainstream landscape architecture often persists in simplified representations of nature and ecological measures in the landscape, Vogt takes a more demanding stance: ecology is invisible and not something to be depicted but rather negotiated through ontologies and agencies that cohabit the site. The projects by Vogt compress territorial complexity into perceivable yet ambiguous and low-res experiences, never through explicit narration but through a choreography of clues — employing abstraction, juxtaposition, objectification, fragmentation, and reappropriation as operative tools.
Vogt’s approach often revolves around the compression and transposition of spatial and temporal scales, reframing or unframing landscape as simultaneously archival, experimental, and projective: recording the past, engaging with the present, and opening into possible futures. This emphasis on the simultaneous presence of multiple non-synchronous temporalities, held together within the evolving ground of the site, echoes Giorgio Agamben’s notion of contemporariness as “that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection”.
Vogt’s projects reflect an understanding of landscape architecture as a cumulative, evolving field of knowledge, where each project expands the studio’s capacity to observe, to collect, and to articulate the complexities of landscape as material for continuous experimentation and discovery.
Read More
LILA 2025 Office Award
BOGL
This year, the LILA Office Award turns its gaze to the center of the profession — not to its margins nor speculation, but to the persistent, complex work of shaping the shared ground of cities. What does urban life require today? How do we inhabit and imagine togetherness in a world marked by ecological precarity, infrastructural stress, and social fragmentation? And what is the role of the landscape architect in holding space — materially, politically, and aesthetically — for emerging forms of coexistence?
The editors of Landezine recognize BOGL for their steadfast and articulate response to these questions. With offices in Copenhagen and Oslo, the practice has developed a distinct capacity to navigate the layered demands of contemporary public space — not through formal overstatement, but through calibrated attentiveness. Their work moves fluently between scales and typologies: stitching together post-industrial voids, infrastructural seams, and residual urban surfaces into sites of both ecological acceleration and collective intimacy. BOGL’s projects offer spatial sequences of quiet intent — where patchwork becomes structure, reuse becomes narrative, and openess becomes invitation. The studio’s strength lies not in aesthetic signature, but in a practiced ethos of responsiveness: to site, to community, to future conditions.
BOGL demonstrates that restraint and ambition need not be opposites. Their projects reuse materials with precision, embed climate adaptation within the texture of everyday life, and foreground the social without forgetting the multispecies. For their consistent and evolving contribution to a grounded, civic, and future-aware landscape architecture, we are pleased to name BOGL the recipient of the 2025 LILA Office Award.
Read More
LILA 2025 Jury Award
Parco della Pace by PAN Associati and EMF – Estudi Martì Franch
Parco della Pace is a transformation of a former airport into a vast ecological machine that operates simultaneously as water infrastructure, biodiversity habitat, and public space. Parco della Pace offers a complex interplay of geometries—traces of the former runway, the rigid grids of adjacent military grounds, and the superimposed logic of new water systems—generating a distinct spatial language that remains legible at multiple scales.
What distinguishes this project is its unapologetic embrace of scale, engineering, and earthworks, yet without sacrificing ecological subtlety. The site functions as a large-scale detention basin, integrating hydrological processes into a resilient landscape capable of absorbing and slowly releasing floodwaters. Water becomes both technical infrastructure and ecological mediator, generating new habitat edges and transitional ecotones that allow species to recolonize this former infrastructural void.
Beyond its technical accomplishments, Parco della Pace also offers a productive ambiguity between program and process. Today, it offers a base that is generous, extensive, and resolutely territorial in scale. In time, it will negotiate between the formal and the open-ended, between cultural programming and wilderness zones left to self-organisation. The project resists the impulse for total scripting, instead establishing a layered framework that will evolve across ecological time. In this sense, the park presents a form of engineered openness, where large-scale interventions initiate processes whose full resolution remains necessarily incomplete.
Read MorePlace Flagey presents a thoughtful adaptation of an urban square originally designed by Latz + Partner in 2007, situated above an underground parking facility, and updated in 2025 by Kollektif Landscape. The jury recognized the recent intervention as a model for how existing urban surfaces can be recalibrated in response to the escalating demands of climate resiliency. The insertion of new vegetation is both precise and strategic. Without compromising the square’s existing programmatic flexibility—allowing for fairs, markets, and public events—, and in a constrained setting on top of an underground parking, the designers have introduced biodiversity, microclimatic benefits, and shaded refuges along its periphery.
Although the adaptation subtly shifts the atmosphere of the square, it remains in a respectful dialogue with the original design by Latz + Partner. The result is neither an erasure nor an overstatement, but rather a measured augmentation: a restrained, site-specific calibration that addresses the needs of a changing urban climate without abandoning the integrity of the inherited spatial identity. The jury regarded the project not only as a recognition of the design itself, but also of the progressive stance taken by the commissioning city authorities—an approach that seeks quality in frugal and incremental processes.
Read MoreThe jury recognized the imaginative adaptive reuse of a former wastewater infrastructure, from a discarded concrete object into a lively playscape that engages children in an unusual setting and encourages them to discover new means of play. It is precisely the abstract dimension of the playground, these unique specifics, that separate the playscape from strictly catalogue-based playgrounds and contribute to children’s emancipation and development. In doing so, it affirms play as a creative, cognitive, and social practice—contributing to children’s emancipation from rigid, predefined systems of interaction. The result is an outstanding playscape, both ecological due to adaptive reuse and socially fulfilling.
Read More
LILA 2025 Jury Award
Yanlord Arcadia-Lacy Steps by TROP: terrains+open space
The jury recognizes the Yanlord atrium for its poetic sculptural qualities, offering a playful answer to a dilemma of sufficient conditions for social interaction and space for vegetation and water in a limited space. White semi-transparent platforms ascend from a lush planting like mist, where one can imagine floating above the garden or experience a sense of lightness. The abstract cloud-staircase also offers a social platform, connecting three floors and inviting neighbours to meet »in the air«.
Read More
LILA 2025 Jury Award
Tidal Park Keilehaven by De Urbanisten
The park operates as a life-catcher, drawing in both human and non-human agencies. It is conceived as a public space whose primary function is ecological, where human presence is invited yet not prioritized. Through a subtle modulation of topography, the park amplifies the temporal rhythms of tidal fluctuations, transforming a gently graded surface into a dynamic substrate for biodiversity and spontaneous development.
While introducing softness to the pragmatism of an urban harbour environment, the design employs a sober formal language – orthogonal gabions and descending stair-like structures serve as deliberate counterpoints to the unpredictability and apparent disorder of non-human life processes. In this clear interplay between geometric precision and biological contingency, the park stages an ongoing negotiation between control and emergence, order and flux. It becomes not only a site of encounter but also a quiet manifesto on the coexistence of human intention and ecological autonomy.
Read More
LILA 2025 Landscape And Architecture Jury Award
Gulbenkian Foundation Garden Extension by VDLA and Kengo Kuma
Portugal / Kengo Kuma + VDLA
The jury awarded the LILA Landscape and Architecture Award to the Gulbenkian Foundation Garden Extension by VDLA and Kengo Kuma. The project is remarkable for its interplay between old and new: between existing architecture and new interventions, between the formal garden and the more fluid, confidently shaped new spaces. These new spaces may even subtly reference traditional Portuguese paving, such as the iconic Rossio square, often mistakenly attributed to Burle Marx.
What stands out is how the design engages with its historical context. It compresses over six decades of evolving design attitudes into a layered and ambiguous experience—one that invites theoretical inquiry. The new garden challenges modernist dichotomies: it appears porous, operating as a membrane between the built and the grown, between past metanarratives and emerging ecological uncertainties. The new roof structure plays an important role, complementing the dynamism and lushness of the garden—its lightness challenges the monumentality of the existing museum building. The design is a subtle dialogue machine. Everything is in flux, and the strength of this project lies precisely here—not in resolving tensions, but in sustaining and enhancing them.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury
Winkelriedplatz, Basel by FRL
Franz Reschke Landschaftsarchitektur
As a social space realized through public investment, the project is outstanding in its sobriety, introducing interventions that activate the park by deliberate restraint, lightness and confidence, avoiding the excesses of over-programming. It shows how to effortlessly tackle a typology well known to European cities. The central ‘plaza under the trees’ remains open and unburdened — a space left deliberately undefined, capable of hosting a multiplicity of uses and adapting to unforeseen futures.
Subtle adjustments amplify its everyday functionality: a simple asphalt surface and path extend the spatial affordances for children’s play, while vegetated edges articulate an outdoor room, buffered from adjacent car traffic. The jury recognized in this approach echoes of mottos such as ‘Never demolish, always add,’ associated with the work of Lacaton & Vassal — where social utility and economic pragmatism form the political ground for design action. Winkelriedplatz thus presents itself as public space in its most essential form: adaptive, accessible, and restrained.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury
Hudson River Park’s Gansevoort Peninsula by Field Operations
Gansevoort Peninsula exemplifies a sophisticated effort in programmatic stacking—a compositional strategy frequently employed in the design of American public parks in dense cities. The project assembles a complex sequence of functions: viewpoints, ecological zones, rain garden, an outdoor gym, a dog park, promenades, boardwalks, sports field, a beach, art installation, grove, and the obligatory nod to the picturesque. In dialogue with its flamboyant neighbor, Little Island, the Gansevoort Peninsula establishes itself as a rational, programme based group of high-resolution spaces, an urban interface for a long list of activities.
Amidst this surgically orchestrated layering, one particular zone destabilizes the otherwise expected typologies and ambiences. It is by the southern edge, where the Upland Sandy Bluff meets a sequence of descending hardscape platforms—both steps and terraces—that slide into the Hudson River, allowing visitors to engage directly with the water’s edge. This gesture produces a more abstract encounter. As the tide advances and recedes, water interacts with the horizontal planes, generating an ever-shifting dialogue between solidity and liquidity, stability and flux. Suspended above this tidal choreography is David Hammons’ Whitney-commissioned sculpture »Day’s End«, where the presence of the artwork underlines the absence of its artistic and historic references – a demolished warehouse that hosted Gordon Matta-Clark’s artwork of the same name. Its minimal geometry enhances the surrounding emptiness, allowing history, interpretation, and meaning to remain unresolved. In this moment, Gansevoort Peninsula transcends its functional inventory and opens into a space of heightened ambiguity—a site where natural processes, bodily presence, and cultural memory are held in delicate suspension.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury
Krater, Ljubljana – Creative Laboratory in a Construction Pit by Krater Collective
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.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury - Revisited Projects
Cava do Viriato Urban Regeneration by PROAP – Estudos e Projectos de Arquitectura Paisagista Lda
The project aims to emphasise a historic landscape by rendering it visible. It is a linear path in the shape of a hexagon, a little over 1 km long. The jury recognized the intelligent and sensible use of stone slabs as the unifying element that connects this landscape into perception. The intervention focuses on one task, it appears unconcerned with stacking other programme on its path. It is precisely this decision that amplifies the experience of the linear landscape, achieving more with less. The unified dimensions of the stones along the path offer a scale for measuring and enhanced sensing of the changes in the landscape. It is a powerful ‘one-liner’ project that affects the experience of the entire immediate landscape.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury
Nana Coffee Roasters Bangna by TROP: terrains + open space
Nana operates as an intricate fusion of architecture and landscape, dissolving the conventional thresholds between interior and exterior. The jury recognized in this commercial garden a unique and immersive spatial condition—simultaneously dazzling and disorienting—where porosity becomes both formal strategy and conceptual proposition. Through a disciplined yet playful language of white planes, transparent enclosures, and reflective surfaces, the architecture orchestrates a complex interplay of enclosure and exposure. Vegetation threads through and around these spatial fragments, establishing a continuous exchange between built form and lush planting. The boundaries dissolve into a sequence of micro-environments, where orientation is intentionally destabilized and perception oscillates between intimacy and openness.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury
New Headquarters of the AP-HP by ChartierDalix
The jury recognizes in this project a highly promising technical exploration and refusal of the conventional green wall systems, which often remain dependent on synthetic materials, intensive irrigation, and short-term ornamental performance. In contrast, the wall developed by ChartierDalix articulates a system that is both more resource-efficient and more attuned to local ecological conditions. It eliminates the dependence on plastic and synthetic media, reduces infrastructural complexity, and minimizes the continuous consumption of energy and water that typifies commercial vertical greening solutions.
Yet its significance lies not only in these optimizations. ChartierDalix’s approach constitutes a deeper, more radical reorientation: it does not merely refine the existing paradigm but challenges its underlying premises. Rather than fabricating a controlled vegetal surface, the system establishes conditions for life to self-organize—allowing native and site-adapted species to colonize, stabilize, and evolve over time. In doing so, the wall ceases to function as a decorative skin and becomes an operative ecological interface—an inhabited vertical ground.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury
Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen by STED
The jury recognized the highly elaborate planting of this medical facility as an outstanding example of therapeutic outdoor space. The landscape offers so much detail that it seems it wishes to captivates attention, steering it, at least for a moment, from health issues to the plants and meticulous design. But it is more than a distraction, it promotes open-air activities and open-ended occupation. This way, landscape becomes involved as an agent in the healing process.
Though the therapeutic potential of gardens is widely acknowledged, such spaces are frequently marginalised within medical institutions—subordinated to hygienic protocols, risk management, and operational pragmatics. This project counters that tendency, demonstrating that even within the tightly regulated environment of a hospital, landscape can be afforded a meaningful presence. Here, architecture does not merely accommodate its outdoor counterpart, but enters into a deliberate and composed dialogue with it.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury
Spaarndammerhart by DS landscape architects
The jury recognizes Spaarndammerhart as a biodiverse and socially attuned response to urban densification. Built on the grounds of a former primary school, the project inserts a new residential ensemble within an existing urban block, negotiating the pressures of compact city development without sacrificing spatial generosity or community potential. In its limited space it introduces a range of conditions, from a public courtyard, to collective gardens, to private terraces.
The outer gardens, while currently accessible only to the immediate residents, are constructed as spaces of latent openness. The need for shared decision-making—where any change requires mutual agreement—produces a political condition: the garden becomes at once resistant to arbitrary individual interventions and structurally open to collective reconfiguration. The outer path around the building appears as a comforting living environment and a generous playscape with lots of places to hide and be curious about who is around the corner.
Read More Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury
Porch House by HILLWORKS
The jury recognizes in Porch House a promising beginning—a careful act of reclamation that allows the site’s residual character to remain present while offering space for new life to gradually assert itself through a slow dialogue between the existing walls, new architecture and evolving plants, negotiating their space in the ruin. Situated within the remains of a former warehouse, the design accepts the given conditions—the weathered walls, industrial remnants, and raw materiality—as active participants in the emerging landscape. Porch House demonstrates a productive position for small-scale landscape interventions: embracing incompleteness, cultivating hybrid conditions, and staging the possibility for future ecological and spatial complexity to unfold.
Read More
LILA 2025 Portfolio Award for Students and Young Professionals
Ana Patricia Garrido Chavez
The portfolio of Ana Garrido marks the early contours of a versatile and experimental landscape practice, one animated by a palpable joy in making. Trained as a dancer, Garrido brings movement into the space of landscape architecture not only as metaphor but as method — approaching sites as performative terrains, where bodily presence becomes a mode of spatial inquiry. The design process oscillates between disciplines, allowing choreography to leak into drawing, digital into analogue, reflecting a promising and restless creative force that refuses to settle in a singular approach to landscape.
Read More
LILA 2025 Sponsor
