be immoderate at the LandscapeArchitecturePrize

The Austrian Society for Landscape Architecture is once again awarding a prize. This year, the motto of the LandscapeArchitecturePrize is “immoderate”. After times of austerity during the pandemic, restraint is now allowed to fall. Open spaces can be boundless.

The LandscapeArchitecturePrize is an ideas competition aimed at students and young graduates of landscape architecture and planning. This year, it calls on young people to think out of the box. After the past times of hardship, it is now time to think beyond the minimal and necessary. The ideas competition invites and encourages people to think and design freely. It looks for ideas and perspectives for open spaces in the city. Rarely have open spaces been so highly valued in recent years as they have been during the restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

The Austrian Society for Landscape Architecture awards the LAP every two years. This prize, designed as an ideas competition, is aimed at students and young practitioners in landscape architecture and landscape planning. This competition regularly gives them the opportunity to work creatively, present their ideas publicly and compete with their peers. This year, the participants are being asked to think about open spaces without limits or restrictions. The up-and-coming colleagues are allowed to leave all requirements, norms, limits and economic constraints behind them. They can dream up and design large, lush open spaces. The motto of the competition is: Think bigger! Reach for the stars! Let’s show that open spaces are not only valuable assets in emergency situations!

Austrian Society for Landscape Architecture

The Austrian Society for Landscape Architecture (ÖGLA) is the umbrella organization of the profession. It offers services and events for its members and interested parties. With the House of Landscape, it also operates a space in which issues and challenges of landscape architecture and landscape planning are discussed. The Austrian Society for Landscape Architecture awards the LandscapeArchitecturePrize every two years. It receives support from various sponsors, without whom the award would not be possible.

Students and young graduates

The LandscapeArchitecturePrize encourages students and young graduates to experiment and rethink, reinterpret and redesign open spaces. In this open and creative approach to landscape, the tools of the trade are further developed. Innovations can take shape. The competition is always keen to focus on everyday situations. Accordingly, it does not ask the young creatives for solutions to extraordinary tasks. Instead, it encourages them to engage with everyday spaces and places. The participants in the competition can therefore deal with a topic of open space planning free from university or realpolitik constraints. At the same time, they gain valuable experience in the context of a competition.

Gap – topic in 2019

The last round of the LandscapeArchitecturePrize focused on gaps. The city and countryside are full of gaps. These small and large (intermediate) spaces are waiting to be discovered and worked on. The 2019 prize encouraged this. It drew attention to gaps between places or between cities, gaps between houses, in the neighborhood, on the doorstep. Gaps are often places where something is missing and the coherent whole seems incomplete. The special nature of gaps offers possibilities and opportunities. With this in mind, the 2019 LandscapeArchitecturePrize called on students and young graduates to find a gap and to use, reinterpret and design it.

The 2019 winners were three students from Vienna. Under the title “Mind the Gap! Ruins in the urban landscape”, they showed ways to create open space for everyone in the dense, evolved urban structure of Palermo. They proposed four strategies for creating different atmospheres in ruins and wasteland. In doing so, they drew on Palermo’s history, culture and places of longing. The design used simple means and a sensitive approach to create a network of spaces that can grow into a generous open space structure in Parlermo.

Two years after looking at the gaps, it’s time to think bigger – without limits. The participants of the LAP 2021 are called upon to reach for the stars. In many months of coronavirus-related restrictions, the competition encourages people to think freely. The pandemic has shown how important high-quality and sufficient open spaces are. During this time, a great need for action has become apparent. Against this backdrop, it is all the more important to overcome the chapter of restraint. The future needs new open space perspectives, according to the call for proposals for the LAP 2021, which calls for thinking beyond the minimal and necessary. For this reason, the title of the competition is short: dimensionless. We are therefore looking for design ideas and visions in the form of temporary or permanent planning proposals. They may address and improve a self-selected open space situation. They may also include strategies and instructions for action. In any case, a creative approach must be recognizable.

Eligibility

All students of landscape architecture and landscape planning are eligible to participate. It does not matter in which semester or at which university they are studying. Graduates who completed their studies in 2020 or 2021 are also eligible. Deadline is November 12, 2021.

Are you interested in award-winning open spaces in German-speaking countries? We have compiled the award-winning projects of the German Landscape Architecture Prize 2021. You can get an overview here.