2025 LILA Project Special Mentions
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 Sponsor
