Portfolio: Zachary Elliott « Landezine International Landscape Award LILA

LILA 2026 Portfolio Award
Portfolio: Zachary Elliott

LILA sponsor is Landscape Forms
www.landscapeforms.com/

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.

- from the award statements

I first came to landscape architecture through geography. Studying human and physical geography at Oxford trained me to read landscapes before I ever learnt to draw them. That research-led attitude, understanding a place, then designing with it, shapes every aspect of my work.

My projects are preoccupied with post-industrial places: sites where industry has left, ecologies that nobody planned or planted, and communities left behind with places that no longer have a clear purpose. These are landscapes left between preservation and demolition, places full of memory that are too significant to abandon and too expensive to save. I’m interested in what landscape architecture can do in that gap, what stories we can tell about places constantly oscillating between their rich pasts, their ambiguous presents, and uncertain futures.

My work combines rigorous site research with experimental methods – photogrammetry, archival work, physical model-making, speculative visualisation – to question how we read and work with post-industrial places. I try to let the site and its stories, materials, and character lead the design rather than impose a design language from the outside.