We spoke with Martin Rein-Cano, founder of Topotek 1, on the occasion of the office’s 30th anniversary. Established in Berlin, Topotek 1 has been awarded the LILA Office Award (2020) and has received numerous international recognitions, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2016), the German Landscape Architecture Prize (2003, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015), the Red Dot Best of the Best Award (2013), and the AILA National Landscape Architecture Award (2018), among others. Born in Buenos Aires in 1967, Rein-Cano studied art history at Goethe University Frankfurt and landscape architecture at the Technical Universities of Hannover and Karlsruhe.

You published the book Creative Infidelities for the 20th anniversary. The concluding part of the book was called, What comes next? Meanwhile, we had the pandemic, consecutive heat records, the birth of AI, wars, and the entropy of the post-war world order. So all things considered, what did come next for Topotek 1?

I feel that what happened in the first twenty years was the conceptual essence of the studio’s history. In the last ten years, I don’t think we added anything that was essentially new, conceptually, although we did many projects and expanded internationally. There were also many failures. We tried to move into architecture after twenty years, won major competitions, and then saw them cancelled for political reasons. In terms of content, that excursion into architecture nonetheless shifted how I understand what I do.

Creative Infidelities, On the Landscape Architecture of Topotek 1 / Barbara Steiner (ed.)

But do you see that this kind of non-binary relationship between architecture and landscape architecture should be more embraced? Do you see this queerness as a kind of future?

I always felt that landscape architecture was seen as somewhat weak compared to other creative professions or planning. It mattered to show that we can be as mean as architects, that we don’t have to eat from what’s left on their plate. Many architectural offices have started running landscape departments in recent years, so why not go the other way? There is risk, of course. With many landscape projects, if one fails, others carry on, and the balance holds. With architecture, you always have these big ships that you can’t move as fast as you do with the small boats.

On one hand, I always felt there is this lack of order in landscape architecture, this idea that in landscape architecture, there was seldom systematisation. It’s more thought of as a kind of free-spirited composition: a bit of lawn, a bit of trees, a bit of water, and maybe a bit of program. On the other hand, landscapes are always dynamic. Architects’ understanding of their buildings is a much more static one.

University of Art and Design, Offenbach am Main, Germany, 1st Prize at Invited competition, 2022

But is there a project that could define this past decade of Topotek 1 in a way Superkilen did the decade before?

The project we won in Manosque, France, is one we are genuinely proud of. It is one of the few projects where Topotek 1 covered all three disciplines—urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture.

We approached it strategically. Locally, it called for a design response; nationally, it demanded a strategy. Emmanuel Macron, who launched the competition, wanted projects that could resonate beyond the site—models adaptable to ten other French locations facing similar issues. Our response focused on a distinctly zeitgeist theme: reuse. We called the strategy Situational Optimisation.

Situational Optimisation, The Ponsonne Sports, Leisure and Ecology Park, Manosque, France, Competition 2025, 1st Prize

The “situative” always contains an element of the irrational, which is often the soul of a place. Its value is not only ecological or sustainable, but also emotional and identitarian. Situational Optimisation means improving a place by working with what is already there—by reading it, not replacing it. It was gratifying to see this approach recognised, because strategies can travel; forms should not.

You said in Creative Infidelities that narratives turn spaces into places. But nowadays, we are surrounded by stories; every dish you order has a story that interrupts your meal. Since I know that you also like to play with ambiguity when designing places, shouldn’t we narrate less?

I love that question, but I think everything depends on the quality of the narration. The problem today is that the markets take over all developments in such a rush that everything needs to be commodified quickly. You can’t even create and live in a nice atmosphere or feeling of the time, because immediately marketing will find it, take away the innocence, and fuck it up.

I don’t think there was ever a time without narration. The only built thing that doesn’t have this narrative is l’art pour l’art—the idea that art doesn’t need to be justified. But even there, it gets on my nerves because art fought for the idea of not having to be justified, and then they also have too much narration nowadays. Narration is a tool that you have, and you have to be good at applying it.

Greenwashing is a topic we are quite serious about. In capitalism today, it is sometimes difficult for landscape architects to avoid it, due to what others involved in the production of space insist on: clients, people, marketing … Do you feel you have to actively avoid greenwashing as a practice?

I don’t think we can do greenwashing—we couldn’t even if we tried. To do it, you would have to not know it’s greenwashing. You’d have to be either stupid or religiously convinced that you are saving the world. We can’t do that. For me, as I said in Manosque, sustainability has always been a design question.

That said, I value rationality as much as I value sentiment around place, and I also enjoy misusing trends. In Høje-Taastrup, near Copenhagen, we integrated a rainwater collector that only holds water three or four times a year; the rest of the time it’s dry. We turned it into a kilometre-long skate line. No client would ever have approved a skate line of that length on its own—but framed as a sustainability problem, it became possible. A sustainable necessity suddenly generated a social programme.

Høje Taastrup, Denmark, 2022

I like this kind of adversity: when new problems reveal hidden potentials you would never have discovered otherwise, and that you could never have argued for without those problems. What I dislike is falling back into a kind of naturalistic autism—where every answer is romanticised, and the solution is always a lawn, a bit of water, and a tree.

But don’t you think that landscape architecture is historically and structurally wired to harmonisation?

I think it is necessary to emancipate ourselves from the idea that we must harmonise places—the price has always been high. I prefer places of conflict to places of harmony.

Places of cultivated conflict are what cities need. These are spaces that landscape architecture, as a public provider, should produce. Social harmony matters more than visual harmony, and it tends to emerge when spaces allow the conflicts we carry as humans to be discussed, treated, catalysed, and made visible. Once conflicts become visible, they are no longer pure conflict; in psychoanalytic terms, they can be transformed into character. A problem has to surface in order to be processed. That, I think, is one of the roles of public space: to display conflicts and make them, in a certain way, acceptable.

Tempelhof is my absolute favourite park. No one designed it—it was an airport, it was opened, and the public programs it on its own.

Of course, similar effects can be produced through design: through programming, provocation, or by deliberately cultivating and forcing certain conflicts, as we did with the boxing ring at Superkilen. The fact that we are not peaceful—that we have violent and conflictive capacities—should not automatically be seen as negative. These capacities are also sources of creativity and, paradoxically, of peace.

Pushing the “bad” out of the image and pretending everything will be fine does not help. It usually means repressing parts of the population. Many large English gardens were commissioned by elites whose wealth came from colonial and slave-based economies; they needed a new image. Without slavery, English landscape gardens would not have existed—yet they were later copied worldwide as a model of freedom in landscape.

True, harmony can be quite dystopian … But did you notice that picturesque survived modernism? Of course, you have the function-driven landscape design like Brasília, but so often in those times, the picturesque reappears as a counterpoint to the architectural grid. In this sense, the representation of nature remained intact from the 18th century, carried all the way through, and is still thriving today, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. The break never happened.

True. In Brazil, ornament was abolished, but the plants are so exuberant that they became the ornament. Modernism never allowed landscape to emancipate; there was no Bauhaus for landscape.

In a way, the English landscape garden was the Bauhaus. By dissolving walls, introducing the ha-has and similar devices. It shifted from a strict enclosure to something more fluid. One could argue that modernisation happened there much earlier. The problem is that it was capitalistic: it tricked you into believing that this was nature.

What is also radical about the English landscape garden is the dissolution of space itself. Landscape dissolves into landscape because it has no boundaries; space dissolves into space. The very word “garden” implies holding a place together with a wall, and then suddenly, they decided to remove the wall. It took architects two hundred years longer to do the same.

Superkilen foregrounds conflict rather than resolving it. In such projects, the landscape architect inevitably mediates between the subject, the state, and normative frameworks—the Big Other, in psychoanalytic terms. How conscious are you of this perceptual framing of conflict? Can design ever be neutral in this role, or does the entanglement of aesthetics and politics make neutrality a fiction?

Even opening the gates of Tempelhof was a design decision. How much you need to do depends on the psychic problem. A psychotic condition requires a different treatment than a neurotic one—and sometimes it’s just a mild, everyday neurosis that we all share. That is a completely different situation from something deeply pathological.

The diagnosis matters. You have to analyse the condition in order to know how to engage with a place and with the people around it. Sometimes all it takes is opening a gate and letting new air in, which is actually closer to behavioural therapy; it’s relatively easy.

That would be closer to behavioural therapy; it’s relatively easy. Superkilen, by contrast, is more Freudian—it demands deeper involvement. There is no rule about doing too much or too little; there is always the risk of prescribing the wrong medication. That happens often. Trying to harmonise things can be like giving children drugs to calm them down when they misbehave.

The Xanax landscape…

Yes—rather than opting for an instant sedation response, there is value in allowing wilderness to take over, in tolerating it, in letting things be cultivated over time. That kind of immediacy always comes at a price. Some projects feel as if they give a patient with cancer an aspirin, and a patient with a headache chemotherapy.

As I said about Manosque, the site was a mess, full of leftovers typical of a 1950s or 1960s banlieue or some new town in France. The question was how to deal with that without being corrective, but instead optimising. That is very different from simply listing everything that is wrong. How do you resist building anew, resist that kind of power, and instead try to be humble and democratic with space? That means accepting differences and accepting that a perfect system is impossible.

Situational Optimisation, The Ponsonne Sports, Leisure and Ecology Park, Manosque, France, Competition 2025, 1st Prize

But humbleness should not be misunderstood. It does not mean the apologetic restraint so typical of landscape architects. Optimisation can be a forceful process, and I want that process to be visible. Respect usually means engaging with a person or a place and articulating that engagement clearly. I would never leave a place without having done something visible. Being humble and respectful does not mean disregarding yourself or your intentions.

The idea behind Superkilen was also driven by the English landscape garden, as a place of ruins and temples, with vegetation gathered from all over the world. There is no better example of how a garden can manipulate identity.

Superkilen, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2011

Traditions are not god-given; they are transformable. In Superkilen, nothing is Danish—no lamp, no tree, nothing. Landscape architecture is perhaps the only profession that has managed to combine the god-given and the man-made—things that always appear as “not made”—with artifacts and ideas of identity. That combination, incorporating the dynamism of nature while staging identity, is both unique and intelligent.

That’s a compelling way of transposing the picturesque; collecting elements from different parts of the world, recontextualising them into a sort of ‘togetherness of otherness’. And meanwhile, acknowledge conflicts that emerge on the way or are already present?

Yes, it was a kind of Picturesque 2.0. You can always steal from past traditions—by shifting identity through disparate objects, by creating what I would call “super realities,” or by introducing new programmes like boxing or a music box. People tend to misunderstand tradition as something god-given.

Superkilen, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2011

One lesson is that landscape architects need visibility—to be part of the game. The profession is still stuck in a kind of pre-feminist state, and it needs to emancipate itself from that. We should be ugly, we should be loud—just like everyone else. We are not confined to the motherly role of “mother nature,” and that’s it. We can be emancipated women, not housewives—with all respect to housewives. That is something I learned from Superkilen: it is possible, it is welcome, and it works.

Topotek 1 has worked in very different geographies—from Australia and Russia to Korea, India, and France. Such work is always relational; there is no universal or neutral position from which a landscape architect can intervene in a foreign context. Is this exchange one-way, or has this cosmopolitanism fed back into the work at home?

Recognising a space as a pre-existing place is always relational. When Topotek 1 arrives somewhere, we are never operating from a ground zero or a neutral position; the encounter is always relative to who and what we are. How distant geographies give something back to our work in Germany—how India, for example, informs us, or whether this kind of eclecticism in a globalised world is productive—is not an easy question.

I am drawn to projects where you are allowed to be more wrong. When you work in your own country, you know it too well, and that makes it difficult to be wrong. Being slightly wrong is often the best thing that can happen—not completely wrong, of course, because then you have simply failed. I mean the freedom that comes from knowing you will never fully grasp the depth of France, Korea, or Australia. That distance creates a space for error, and I enjoy that freedom.

Daegu Hammock, Suseong District – Daegu, Republic of Korea, Competition 2025, 1st Prize

So is it then about ‘embracing foreignness’, rather than trying to blend in and trying to reproduce the identity?

Both strategies are probably valid; I don’t think one is right and the other wrong. I am a foreigner in Germany as well. I was born and raised in Argentina, and although I have lived here most of my life, I have always felt that I do not fully belong.

I am comfortable with that impossibility. I keep trying to belong, and it never quite happens—but I made this condition work for me. Being foreign is an acceptable position. You lose the warmth of the group, perhaps, but in return you gain the freedom to see and to say things that would otherwise remain unspoken. That distance gives you a strong position as a creative person.

But isn’t this position of alienation, of being ‘not entirely at home’ in the world, becoming a universal one? Specifically with climate change, but for some people also through migrations, technological advancement, and urbanisation?

The idea of identity as something monothematic—one religion, one language, one culture—is a fascistic idea that rose in the nineteenth century with the formation of nation-states. The logic was that one country should speak one language, so everything would function more smoothly. But if you look at Eastern Europe, for a long time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a remarkably complex and productive mix of identities and languages. Speaking three or four languages within one city was normal, and it was not a problem.

If you can establish a shared basis—where people work, coexist, and respect a necessary minimum—that is, for me, the foundation of society. What is difficult to accept is that how you live, and what you consider right or wrong, is not necessarily shared by everyone else. Without romanticising it, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of the best historical examples of this condition, and perhaps the European Union was—or still is—attempting something similar.

Yugoslavia tried something similar, but fell apart painfully …

If you look at those stories of multi-national experiments, they were successful for a long time. Of course, in many ways, they didn’t work in the end, which brings us to the start of the interview; maybe we have this kind of self-destructive moment. We have this hate in us, as we have the love; if we have too much peace for too long, we get bored and mess it up.

The lack, we end in psychoanalysis…

Yes, it’s this eternal lack. I don’t know how, if ever, we can overcome this Machiavellian thinking, or if we will ever be “dream-humans” like those dreamt of by communism or religions all around the world. I don’t know if it will ever happen; it doesn’t look like that right now.