2026 Recognitions

Wednesday, July 1st, 2026: Recognitions of the LILA – Landezine International Landscape Award 2026 are announced. The Landezine team warmly congratulates all recognised practices and extends sincere thanks to all participants, the jury, and our sponsor, Landscape Forms.

Four editorial recognitions — the Honour Award, Office Award and Portfolio Awards — were selected by the editors of Landezine. Nine LILA Jury Awards and nine LILA Jury Distinctions for projects were selected by the jury members Jacqueline Osty, Jens Linnet, Michael Young, Silvia Benedito, and Zaš Brezar.

The 2026 LILA Honour Award is presented to Walter J. Hood, designer, educator, and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Since establishing the studio in 1992, Hood has built a body of work that ranges from early neighbourhood parks in Oakland to major civic and memorial landscapes. He is recognised for expanding landscape architecture into a practice of cultural memory and visibility.

Across parks, museum grounds, civic spaces, ordinary urban landscapes, lectures and writing, he has consistently shown that public space can never be a neutral ground but rather a field where histories are buried or revealed and where communities are ignored or recognised. His work has demonstrated that landscape architecture can become a civic instrument through which what has been suppressed may re-emerge into public view.

The LILA 2026 Office Award is presented to BASE, the French landscape architecture office founded by Franck Poirier and Bertrand Vignal. The office is recognised for a body of work that is imaginative and socially alert. Across parks, streets, waterfronts, neighbourhoods, productive landscapes, brownfields, and territorial strategies, BASE has demonstrated command of the full scope of landscape practice, from detailed public spaces to large-scale transformations. Since 2000, the office has grown into a large practice working from Paris, Lyon and Bordeaux. But BASE has retained a rare willingness to experiment and disrupt, a quality that often becomes harder to protect as offices grow. This is evident throughout their portfolio of complex urban environments, expanding what these places can become by embracing risk. They refuse to create spaces that are too determined, predictable and even too safe. BASE has repeatedly argued that public space should allow users to take risks they could not take elsewhere, pushing risk right up to the legal limits.

The jury was particularly drawn to the project’s ability to treat historical form with seriousness and humour simultaneously. Rather than merely restoring a historic composition, the design speculates on the sense of wonder and estrangement such landscapes may once have produced. The resulting intervention is at once monumental and slightly absurd, transforming inherited geometries into a contemporary landscape that remains capable of surprise and of hosting public life. The project is well aware of contemporary landscape requirements, the ideological regimes that produced it, and situates them within the found historic outline. It objectifies the extravagance of the 18th-century formalism in the present time, hinting at its novelty and radicality centuries ago. Through a careful interplay of historical references, contemporary insertions and intentional anachronisms, the project constructs a rich palimpsest in which different eras and value systems remain visibly present and interact with each other. It offers a productive critique of how strong visual language does not obstruct our common effort to adapt to challenges of today. At the same time, a large part of the park, as experienced from the pedestrian’s perspective, appears as a simple meadow landscape that offers programmatic and design features connected through a geometry that holds these temporal layers together in a daring and unusually witty juxtaposition.

Parque El Jaguar is a complex, large-scale intervention that deals with the protection of natural and cultural heritage, while upgrading the infrastructure through which this territory is experienced. It is multiscalar and dispersed, and at the same time, architecture is highly consistent. From museum architecture to the adaptive reuse of an airfield runway and to very subtle viewpoints, the project embraces the spectacle while resisting the commercialisation of the landscape. Rather than staging the site as a consumable panorama, it invites visitors into immersive experiences, individual and collective, that deepen the engagement with the ecology of the place. The project also inhabits the contact zone where the tropical forest meets the sea with a series of smaller and remarkably precise interventions. Through consistent architectural gestures and carefully handled proportions, it provides a sophisticated public experience and serves as infrastructure for the processes of protection.

The Rhône River Banks project is recognised for the lasting strength of its transformation. A former line of car parking along the river was turned into a continuous public landscape, used for walking, cycling, sport, gathering and informal occupation. Almost twenty years later, the project has not lost relevance and shows it has aged into its promised role through a clear and robust structure: a long, open riverfront able to absorb different uses, flood conditions and degrees of urban intensity.

The jury also appreciated the project’s detailing and technical intelligence. Elements such as the mooring pillars, terraces, paths and planted islands still read as precise and durable. The project is also honest about time. Its authors acknowledge that further planting is now needed to strengthen shade, cooling and biodiversity. Importantly, the original design allows for this without requiring a new concept or major redesign. It can be improved through addition, thickening and care. This confirms the project’s deeper success: it created an infrastructure capable of maturing, adapting and remaining useful.

The Wangen Renaturation Argen is recognised for transforming a previously constrained river corridor into a civic and ecological infrastructure. By restoring spatial capacity, dynamism, and continuity to the Argen, the project redefines the river as a public landscape that supports flood retention, habitat formation, accessibility, and daily use across multiple scales. Rather than prescribing specific uses, the design employs suggestive ambiences, such as shallow banks, gravel edges, paths, and openings, to indicate potential activities. These ambiences are visually gentle yet constructed with robust materials. The project serves as a compelling model for riparian landscapes facing climate uncertainty. In an era of significant public investment in river restoration and renaturalization, it demonstrates how ecological regeneration can be integrated with public engagement, multi-species river access, climatic comfort, and collective life.

The jury recognises Juvo for the precision with which a modest infrastructural element becomes a landscape instrument. The guardrail provides safety and acts on perception as it traces the terrain and movement through the gorge. It turns a technical artefact into an abstract, calligraphic register of topography. By opening the historic railing and extending it into the landscape, the project reactivates the relationship between road, geology, water and craftsmanship. Its strength lies in this restraint and a sense of deliberate incompleteness: it allows visitors to enter the intensity of the gorge without dominating it.

The jury appreciated Codha Eco-District for its articulation of three zones: a gradient from hard to less hard, to very soft and permeable areas that deal with rainwater. Although this is a private community garden, most of its surface is given to social use. Strictly private areas are kept to a minimum, in favour of the main plaza and softer communal spaces. The jury further acknowledged that the design dissolves toward the margins and more permeable areas, leaving enough room for spontaneity and appropriation by residents over time.

The project approaches the existing building playfully through adaptive reuse, sometimes collapsing the differences between the old and the new, and sometimes emphasising them to a point of daring juxtaposition. What it achieves with distinction is the verticality of the landscape that, through a texture of roughness and refinement, the built and the grown produce a dramatic and dazzling effect, rendering the space porous, mysterious, and engaging. The adaptive reuse strategy is unapologetic in its retention of the bluntly exposed brick and concrete, drawing upon a distinctly American lineage of industrial conversions. The result is a productive tension between control and weathering within contemporary re-occupation, allowing the entropy of time to remain legible and experienced throughout this new mixed-use district.

The jury was intrigued by the re-enchantment of the familiar made strange by offering the possibilities of play as a non-normative experience in an extreme environment of Nuuk, Greenland. The playscape is established by the snow-melting infrastructure in a dialogue with the more conventional play equipment. The design of hard surfaces, slopes, water movement, and gravel testifies to a design sensibility that can tackle these harsh climate latitudes whilst offering forms of play within this radical terrain. Through a spatial vocabulary of cracking, melting slopes, incisions, and sedimentation, processes intrinsic to this landscape, the project transforms geological and hydrological processes into a play area that invites discovery and unmediated interaction.

Ferme du Chaudron demonstrates how adaptive reuse can support not only the preservation of built heritage, but also the renewal of productive landscapes, a former farmstead. The project brings together several organisations dedicated to sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty, creating a shared framework for production, education and collective gathering. The jury found the intervention both fresh and necessary, particularly in how it redesigns the farm grounds and creates conditions for collaboration, exchange, and collective agency. The project demonstrates the landscape’s capacity to act as a transformative framework that accommodates ecological, social, and productive functions with spatial specificity and tectonic expression.

Zachary Elliott is recognised by the editors of Landezine for a daring and strongly individual portfolio that combines remarkably precise intellectual positions with spatial, material and temporal imagination. His work demonstrates a high level of design autonomy and a mature understanding of heritage, especially in projects such as Archiving the Ruin, where imagined experiences are risky, strange and eerie, and where landscapes embrace the uncanny nature of decay far beyond the usual aesthetics of the “beautiful ruin.” Elliott’s memorable images possess an outstanding ability to make one think rather than merely arouse awe or admiration, as if every image were also a question. The portfolio demonstrates difficult-site intelligence, conceptual rigour and a rare ability to leave a site’s contradictions exposed. In this sense, Elliott opens complex spaces behind problems, rearticulating them through design rather than applying conventional solutions. His portfolio is a set of courageous approaches to landscape, showing outstanding spatial imagination in which strangeness and risk become the very conditions through which design thinks.