2025 LILA Honour Award

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.