Please note that registration is required for physical attendance at AHO in Oslo. You may also join the event online, as it will be streamed live from AHO.
Unlike architecture, landscape architecture’s relative smallness as a global community, has consistently depended on practice as its primary mode of innovation. Theory and scholarship often follow, rather than precede, inventions happening within practice. In this context, making is not “soft science” but rather the primary means through with the field advances, and the idea of “project” as knowledge and evidence of innovation must be brought forward.
To mark the 20th anniversary of AHO’s International Master of Landscape Architecture this conference brings together a generation of European practices that emerged over the past two decades, coinciding with the time span that our program has been active. Despite differences in geography, climate, and culture, these offices share a profound sensibility toward the environmental, spatial, and political questions that define this century’s first two decades.
Programme
- 10:00 Introduction. Rector Irene Alma Lønne
- 10:10 Commons, Systems, Form. IMLA 20th anniversary
- 10:30 Karin Helms. Commons: An expanded notion
- 11:00 Bas Smets (Brussels)
- 11:40 Ludivine Gragy (Berlin)
- 12:20 Lunch
- 13:10 Sabine Müller. Systems: Legibility and Action
- 13:40 Elisa Cattaneo (Milano)
- 14:20 Maximilian Schob (Oslo)
- 15:00 Break – Gallery walk
- 15:30 Luis Callejas. Form: landscape and architecture
- 16:00 Rémy Turquin (Paris)
- 16:40 Beatriz Borque (Barcelona)
- 17:20 Break
- 17:35 Snøhetta: Past twenty years of landscape works
The project of Commons, Systems and Form
The triad that was recently proposed to shape AHO’s landscape architecture education is used as lens to curate and understand the six invited practices and their ongoing contribution to the field.
Commons: Projects that question what public space means in the XXI century. This question is linked to the evolution of typology, beyond parks, plazas and boulevards, urban surfaces emerge in the last two decades as spaces the demand coexistence with other species.
Systems: Questions the abstract by-dimensional blue-green infrastructure paradigm and seeks for designs that are inherently dynamic, relational and perceived in 3-dimensional space, binding climate, ground, water and living beings into bounded systems.
Form: Projects that address the early XXI century crisis of style in landscape architecture. This question is linked to the relevance of aesthetics. What is beautiful today, discussing also the role of craftsmanship, detailing, and sophisticated approaches to form and structure.
Each practice will present three projects through the lens of methods that are characteristic of the turn of the century, in other words, each practice will be pushed to discuss what is truly contemporary, new or inventive, both in terms of method and result, all while understanding that landscape architecture projects take time to mature and newness has perhaps a deeper meaning than in other faster designs disciplines.
The event is open to the public and will be streamed live.
Part of AHO’s 80th Anniversary
This event is part of AHO’s anniversary programme in 2025. Throughout the autumn, we are marking AHO’s 80 years with public events, exhibitions and lectures in architecture, design, landscape architecture and urbanism.