AHO: IMLA 20th Anniversary conference "Commons, Systems and Form"

25 November

10.00 - 18:30

AHO - A2 (limited number of seats - the conference will also be streamed)

 

Over the past two decades, landscape architecture has faced converging global challenges: economic instability, technological change, environmental urgency, and profound shifts in education. Unlike the broader field of architecture, its relatively small international community continues to rely on practice as the primary driver of innovation. Theory and scholarship tend to follow, rather than precede, the inventions that emerge in practice. In this sense, making is not a “soft science” but the primary means through which the discipline advances.

 

To mark the 20th anniversary of AHO’s International Master in Landscape Architecture, and as part of AHO’s 80 jubilee, this conference brings together a generation of European practices that, like our program, appear somehow both young and mature. Founded after 2005, these offices have been shaped from the outset by the environmental, aesthetic, and political questions defining the early 21st century. Though still relatively young, they are making lasting contributions to the field. The day will conclude with a keynote by Snøhetta, a practice older than twenty years, but one that has profoundly shaped the intersection of landscape and architecture globally over the past decades.

 

Each practice will present three projects through the lens of methods characteristic of this era. They are invited to articulate what feels genuinely contemporary, inventive, or new, both in method and in outcome.

 

In parallel to the conference, the AHO Gallery will host an exhibition of works from the master studio sequence, showcasing a selection of projects from recent years. Together, the conference and exhibition reflect on the three pillars of landscape architecture at AHO:

 

Commons: Projects that question the meaning of public space in the 21st  century. Beyond parks, plazas, and boulevards, contemporary urban surfaces demand coexistence with other species.

 

Systems: Projects that challenge the two-dimensional paradigm of “blue-green infrastructure” by proposing dynamic and relational designs that bind climate, ground, water, and living beings into spatial, measurable systems.

 

Form: Projects that confront the early 21st-century crisis of style in landscape architecture. This includes rethinking the contemporary relevance of  aesthetics—what is beautiful today? while also revisiting craftsmanship, detailing, and sophisticated approaches to form, structure, and composition.

 

 

10:00 Introduction. Rector Irene Alma Lønne

10:10 Commons, Systems, Form. IMLA 20th anniversary. Hanna Dencik Petersson and IMLA teachers

10:30 Karin Helms. Commons: An expanded notion

11:00 Bas Smets. Brussels

11:40 Ludivine Gragy. Berlin

 

12:20 Lunch break

 

13:10 Sabine Müller. Systems: Legibility and Action  

13:40 Elisa Cattaneo. Milano

14:20 Maximilian Schob. Oslo

 

15:00 Break - Gallery walk. IMLA Studios exhibition

 

15:30 Luis Callejas. Form: Landscape and Architecture 

16:00 Rémy Turquin. Paris

16:40 Beatriz Borque. Barcelona

17:20 Break 

17:35 Jenny Osuldsen: Snøhetta’s Landscape Works