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Watch the video of the lecture: https://youtu.be/eZII5ZRraSE

«Unruly places have the power to disrupt our expectations, of stimulating and reshaping our geographical imagination, to reenchant geography...Space sounds modern in a way that place doesn't. The reaction of modern societies has been to straighten and rationalize...the oddity of place.»
—Alastair Bonnett. Unruly Places

The replacement of the unique and specific with the generic is a sign of our times. Cities make no exception. In the name of the modern, new and improved, the luring richness, unexpected and uncontrolled are being standardized out of our urban landscapes. The result is often a sterile built environment with scary resemblance to architectural renderings that has little to do with the unfolding of human experience.

Robin Winogrond will show a series of her projects in Switzerland and Germany, most often on the urban periphery, which increasingly focus on sussing out the poetic potential of the banality of our contemporary urban landscape. What in a place engages our imagination or leaves us cold? Using a narrative approach, the projects become testing grounds to re-enchant each specific site with the power of its own inherent qualities expressing the underestimated oddity of place inherent in our contemporary urban landscapes.

Robin Winogrond is landscape architect and urban designer in Zurich, Switzerland. She practices internationally on projects, juries, lecturing, teaching and publishing. From 2019–21 she taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her interdisciplinary background is reflected in an array of prizewinning projects ranging from built urban space, installations and gardens to concepts for large and small-scale open space. She was Resident Artist at Stuttgart Academy of Art, holds a Master’s in Landscape Architecture and Bachelor’s in Urban Design. Under the working title “In search of Geographical Re-enchantment” her projects express the site specific, poetic potential of suburban and urban sites, transforming their inherent identity and contradictions into powerful experiences. Winogrond’s projects build upon her theoretical work on atmosphere, imagination, phenomenology of space, environmental psychology and activating social placemaking. She is co-founder of Studio Vulkan Landschaftsarchitektur, where she was partner from 2014–2020.

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.