2025 LILA Project Awards

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.

Place 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.

The 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.

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«.

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.

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.