IKA Lecture Series Summer 2026

The ways we, as landscape architects and architects, act in urban space and that we act with urban space are undergoing critical revision. While future form and function of the urban habitat can only be speculated about, the dramatic urgency of adaptation is all but contested. Our cities are in a multiple crisis, and we cannot know well what lies ahead, yet acting is of paramount importance. Learning while doing, finding agency, using tools of participation and collaboration, as well as a more hands-on engagement with the site and people are increasingly made part of projects where initial demands and questions cannot always be clear or dependable. In recent decades, practices in landscape architecture and urbanism have challenged standards in planning and constructing, by developing alternative approaches to creating spaces by employing a more careful view on guarding existing structures, integrating rather than untangling the complex relationships with the past, present and future.

The lectures in the winter semester reflected landscape practices across a number of different projects by landscape architects Daniel Ganz from Zurich, Lilith Unverzagt of atelier le balto from Berlin, and Sarah Cowles of Ruderal Studio from Tbilisi. Critic and writer Françoise Fromonot summarised the scope and impact of French landscape architecture on urban design in the last decades. The second part of the lecture series sets a focus on individual, albeit complex and collaborative projects in the European context.