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From the site to the studio, from observation to implementation and maintenance, Madeleine Accarain will emphasise a gardener's attitude to landscape projects, which can be a way of thinking and developing the city of tomorrow and hoping for a resilient future inspired by natural dynamics. What should we change today in our approach to landscape, programming, transformation and maintenance in order to minimise negative environmental impacts? Where is the sensible and possible line between emissions-intensive construction and a reuse approach?

Madeleine Accarain, architect and landscape designer, studied at the LOCI Brussels faculty of architecture. After a year studying post-industrial territories as part of her Master's degree in architecture, she joined the TAKTYK agency to develop urban planning and landscape projects rooted in urban dynamics. After an additional year of Master's studies at the Ecole du Paysage de Versailles, she joined the Wagon Landscaping team in 2021 as project manager for landscape and public space projects, working on the memorial to the Paris bombings and private and public projects in Paris and Marseille.

Wagon Landscaping is a Paris-based studio founded by Mathieu Gontier and François Vadepied. Madeleine Accarain is project manager and takes part in the studio's main projects.

Wagon Landscaping identifies and develops its project concepts through the practice and gardening of landscapes and the observation of plants and natural dynamics. The agency's practice is based on the development of ecological science and biodiversity, which Wagon Landscaping's partners share in teaching (at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles, in architecture schools in Russia and Italy).

While Wagon Landscaping projects address a narrow niche of small-scale situations, the modes of attention and engagement with landscape that Wagon practices offer pertinent answers to how we might rethink the approach to landscape in other typologies and scales.

Wagon's work is often conceptually intriguing and bold, yet based on minimal transformation, primarily concerned with conditions for growth and the study of soil, plant and animal dynamics. A number of projects deal with the opening up of asphalt, exploring the aesthetics that emerge from an ethical position of leaving the material in place. Although it could be seen as a reference to the artist Lois Weinberger's work Burning and Walking (1992), Wagon took the approach further into research and a range of different applications. The studio team build most of their projects themselves; in addition to computers, the office is well equipped with shovels, rakes and hoes.

L-x, the international Landscape Lectures 2024, brings the current issues of landscape and material resources to the table. Four different positions will be presented from which landscape architects have developed contemporary responses in urban public spaces and landscapes at different scales. How can existing structures be re-used for or complemented by new landscapes at a time when the economical use of land is a high priority - both in terms of land scarcity as well as ecology and green space justice? How can landscape designs be based on the idea of material recycling? Which approaches for re-interpretation of open spaces and landscapes can be realized to add new meanings and at the same time tackle contemporary natural and social urgencies? In this series of lectures, landscape architects from four renowned firms in Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and France will present projects that provide a variety of answers to these questions.