Landscape Architecture Europe (LAE) presents the seventh yearbook on European practice of landscape architecture: Full of Life. 

This seventh edition of the triennial book series Landscape Architecture Europe presents landscape architecture as an activity in support of life and its inherent beauty. Despite these times of social and ecological stress, this volume demonstrates how spatial design and beauty can communicate and enact concern, commitment, collaboration and change.

Landscape Architecture Europe #7 features 42 projects full of life, built or drawn, long-term or temporary, selected from entries submitted from all over Europe. Together with thought-provoking essays and inspiring portraits, this richly illustrated publication shows how to design for diversity and how to work with surprise and uncertainty.

Part 1: Promise of tolerance

In a globalised world, Europe doesn't have clear borders. Migration and communication make it impossible to think of Europe without thinking of the world that surrounds it; a world brought closer by the mobility of ideas, goods, people, and practices. Collaboration is key for professional fields that seek to support planetary life through practice. The work published in this first part of this edition of LAE addresses the question of how to design for inclusion, i.e. for different audiences who share living spaces, even if they do not necessarily share common beliefs, cultures, or behaviours. This is not without conflict. Conflict is caused by ignorance, devaluation, dismissal, and aggression. Even though landscape architects are not trained as sociologists or social workers, many of the selected projects show spatial structures, compositions, atmospheres, in short: aesthetics, that unleash mediating effects. Interpersonal and interspecies tolerance need this physical arena to become manifest in everyday life, with the promise of being transformed into respect, appreciation, coexistence, and engagement with others and otherness.

Part 2: Transitory Beauties

People are undoubtedly aware that things have changed rapidly since the turn of the century. Mostly for the worse, they assume. Talk of crisis dominates many discussions, and life seems to be a mess. Seen from other parts of the world, Europe is still doing well, although it has become messier than it was in the second half of the 20th century. Here, the relative mess can serve as an opportunity: to challenge the growth paradigm of the last century with calls for degrowth, to counter the throwaway society with recycling practices, in short: to think of the world in more dynamic and complex terms. For landscape architects, this is an invitation to mobilise their capacity to work with dynamism and complexity, with surprise and uncertainty, with systems in motion, and with time. Many of the selected projects in this second part of this edition of LAE abandon canonical notions of landscape beauty as static scenery and embrace a transitory aesthetic: not finite but adaptable, not mastered but open-ended, celebrating ever-changing appearances, and appreciating the ambiguity of a situation.

As always, an independent jury of practising landscape architects from different European countries has selected the projects. The jury for this edition consisted of Jandirk Hoekstra (chair), (NL), Martin Allik (Sweden), Fujan Fahmi (Switzerland), Merle Karro-Kalberg (Estonia).

Landscape Architecture Europe (LAE) is a foundation that seeks to enhance the dialogue in landscape architecture on a European level by publishing a triennial yearbook. Produced for the LAE Foundation and European Region of International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA Europe), the books aspire to be the definitive critical review of the state of the art of European landscape architecture.