There are few planners who have such a broad base and focus on the big picture as Lola Landscape Architects from Rotterdam. In addition to employing landscape architects, architects and urban designers, they also collaborate with a large number of partners. They conduct research, for example in the large dike project that resulted in the book “Dutch Dikes” and not only mapped and systematized all the dikes in the Netherlands, but also showed how this greatest Dutch invention is likely to play an increasingly important role in the future. This resulted, for example, in plans for a future-proof port of Rotterdam, even with rising water levels. Lola was founded in 2006 and works mainly in the Netherlands and its neighboring countries and in China.
Many of its projects involve the transformation of disused industrial sites or large sports facilities, which, along with parks, is one of the drivers of urban redevelopment.
Bas Smets, a landscape architect with an office in Brussels, is nominated for the Schelling Architecture Award 2024. He is a seeker of an understanding of the city based on ecology. Smets, who trained in Leuven and Geneva and then worked with Michel Desvigne in Paris, pursues a new understanding of landscape planning in his work.
According to Smets, many things need to be rethought. Landscape planning can play a pioneering role. Smets’ aim is to generate spaces in local urban environments that can be used for longer periods of the year in terms of climate and that are at the same time more resident-friendly.
How closely will landscape planning and urban development have to cooperate in future? Bas Smets believes in the need for
‘biospheric urbanism’. Smets has shown how this can be realised in Arles in the area surrounding Frank Gehry’s Luma Museum.
The Catalan architect Teresa Galí-Izard is nominated for the Schelling Architecture Award 2024. She sees her task as a landscape architect as influencing how people connect with living systems.
The systemic nature of the projects that transform the logic of nature has many layers and scales. Teresa Galí-Izard is familiar with the language and behaviour of water, vegetation, soils, tree architecture and plant life cycles. At the same time, she knows how to identify parameters that intervene in rule-based systems, including infrastructures, management, urban metabolism, temporality and seasonality.
Her Chair of Being Alive at ETH Zurich is a kind of statement through its substantial name alone and deals in the truest sense with life cycles, living beings and the landscape as a basis for life to be rethought.
The Schelling Architecture Award 2022 goes to Sophie Delhay, Paris. The French architect, who founded her own office in Paris in 2008, has become a leading figure in the renewal of urban housing in just a few years.
In her search for a socially relevant architecture, Delhay is almost exclusively concerned with all possible forms of multi-storey housing – an area of construction that seems to offer only minimal freedom across Europe because it is bogged down in the constraints of global real estate financing and land speculation. Starting point for her designs is always specific research into the way of life of future residents.
Sophie Delhay understands her preoccupation with the grievances of today’s housing construction as a very personal, socio-political choice. For her, making suggestions as an architect as to how housing construction can be brought out of its impasse means changing society.
“If you are building today, it is of vital importance to understand that you necessarily always find yourself in a system of relationships”. This is the credo of the architect Lina Ghotmeh, who speaks out in this debate with committed statements, with her buildings and in the context of her teaching. After working with Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel, she taught at the École Spéciale, the most conceptual of the Paris architecture schools shaped by Paul Virilio.
Ghotmeh grew up in Beirut, where she studied at the American University. She was shaped by the time in Lebanon shortly after the civil war. In her methodology as an architect, she advocates an “archeology of the future” as precisely as possible as the starting point for every project. She understands this to mean analyzing what already exists, checking it for its – even painful – meanings + then relinking these with the social and political reality of life on site. Ghotmeh combines this translation service with a strong architectural concept.
