The International Biennial of Landscape Architecture in Barcelona is one of the profession’s most important events. The multiple-day program brings together lectures, presentations, and two awards: the Manuel Ribas Piera International School Prize and the Rosa Barba Casanovas International Landscape Architecture Prize.

Traditionally, the Biennial followed a tight two-day core: Rosa Barba finalists presenting on the first day, keynote speakers and award announcements on the second. This year stepped outside that formula. The structure was looser, more eclectic, and refreshingly unpolished. School programs, project presentations, juror interventions, and invited lectures appeared in a fragmented sequence that formed a shifting collage of landscape voices. The title of the event was Natural Intelligence.

Ten schools presented their work. Their approaches diverged radically: some foregrounded abstract pedagogical processes, others fieldwork, others studio frameworks. The result was difficult to compare but revealed the broad spectrum of how landscape is taught today. The Manuel Ribas Piera International Landscape Schools Award jury comprised Gary R. Hilderbrand (Harvard GSD), Hayriye Eşbah Tunçay (Istanbul Technical University), Luis Callejas (Oslo School of Architecture), Huang Wenjing (Harvard GSD), Eulàlia Gómez Escoda (Barcelona School of Adarchitecture, ETSAB-UPC).

The Manuel Ribas Piera 2025 International Landscape Schools Award went to the University of Greenwich, presented by Ed Wall. The jury also gave an Honourable Mention to the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, PUC. PUC, together with ETH Zurich, were selected ex-aequo for the People’s Choice Award by the biennial audience.

The ten finalists of the 13th Rosa Barba Prize represented a strong and diverse moment in contemporary practice; from adaptive reuse to building anew, from doing almost nothing to doing almost everything.

Turenscape received an IFLA Mention of the Prize for Urban Balcony – Embracing Rewilded Nature, presented by IFLA’s Hermann Georg Gunnlaugsson, who also acknowledged the recent passing of Turenscape’s founder, Kongjian Yu. Later, Tim Waterman offered a further moving tribute to Yu’s influence and legacy. I first met Kongjian at an earlier Biennial, when he invited me to lunch and, to my surprise, expressed interest in buying Landezine. It was a generous and memorable conversation; he came across as an empathetic, thoughtful person and a formidable creative force.

The jury included practitioners and academics Kate Orff, (Professor and Director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia GSAPP and founder of SCAPE), Laura Zampieri, (Professor at IUAV Venice and Partner at Czstudio), Henry Crothers, (Founding Director of LandLAB, Auckland), Bruno Marques, (Associate Dean at Victoria University of Wellington and President of IFLA), and Michel Desvigne, (founder of Michel Desvigne Paysagiste (MDP), and Visiting Professor at Harvard GSD and ENSP Versailles).

Three familiar LILA winners were present among the finalists: Parco della Pace by PAN and EMF, The Bridgefoot Street Park by DFLA, and The Dark Line, designed by mICHELE&mIQUEL and dA VISION DESIGN, which received the Rosa Barba public choice award. The Rosa Barba International Landscape Architecture Prize went to The Grønningen-Bispeparken by SLA.

The Landezine team congratulates all winners!

The area that demands serious attention is the audiovisual culture of project presentations. The widespread use of low-cost, stock-music uplift, sentimental soundtracks, and formulaic drone footage reduces complex public-space interventions into glossy moodboards. This is, unfortunately, more than only a matter of poor taste. It reflects a profound problem: landscape architecture continues to package its work as lifestyle imagery rather than political, ecological, or spatial argument. The genre pushes projects toward naïve utopianism: rainbow-coloured activity, choreographed perfection, surface harmony and fifteen aesthetic climaxes per hectare. In an era defined by social conflicts of many shades, climate trauma, and contested land use, this mode of representation is indefensible. It broadcasts a profession detached from the realities it claims to engage. If one imagines urban sociologists, anthropologists, or political theorists watching these videos, the disconnect becomes devastating. This practice needs to end, not only because it is embarrassing or cringeworthy, but because it critically undermines the discipline’s credibility.

Joao Nunes’ presentation offered a counterpoint. PROAP’s materials were stripped down: raw photographs, slower pacing, minimal drone shots, and, in a rare and welcome choice, interviews with people involved in building the project. In contrast to the highly stylised displays of some finalists, PROAP’s work appeared grounded in site, process, and ordinary daytime reality. Even if the rhetoric of ‘doing almost nothing’ has its limits, Nunes showed that clarity does not require spectacle and that restraint can communicate more than saturated imagery.

One way to gauge the success of an event like this is to observe how far its central notion —landscape architecture—is allowed to stretch. Not only how correctly we speak about landscape, how perfectly we perform our righteousness, but also how we approach its margins and how far we choose to take it. The concept should be agile and elastic enough to squeeze into the tight, urgent spaces of contemporary issues. Which other territories does it reach? How readily does landscape architecture generate productive friction when it brushes against other disciplines?

In this regard, James Bridle’s lecture, coming from well outside our field, functioned as a distant coordinate that introduced exactly the kind of necessary distance. It was an incredibly imaginative contribution and in some way reminded me of a landscape architect in the Anthropocene; trying to figure it out, as the old tools no longer work, we have to find new, and open ourselves to experiment and test new modes of being in the world. To be an artist, engineer, philosopher, tech-savvy, tech-doubtful, inventive, and ready to let the old go.

Although well-rehearsed, the doubt underneath his witty delivery struck true, replacing commodified ‘TED Talk optimism’ with a much more credible uncertainty and anxiety over the darkening new age we live in.

The idea of inviting jurors to offer “interventions” was promising. Many of them were charming speakers with valuable perspectives, but the format reverted again to project showings. The opportunity for genuine critical dialogue slipped away. The Biennial would gain so much more from structured panels where jurors discuss themes emerging from the submissions: conflicts, tendencies, ideological shifts, blind spots. Such panels could offer a productive conversation between stage and audience, shifting the event from a catalogue of projects to a forum for thinking about the state of the discipline.

One such moment happened on the last day, when Divya Shah and Thomas Woltz entered into discussion, moderated by Tim Waterman. It was a reminder of what happens when the audience is allowed to hear how practitioners with different backgrounds exchange thoughts and develop language around landscape through discussion. Encounters like this show how a creative field advances through the translation and confrontation of ideas across cultures, interests, landscapes, and ambitions, and through the willingness to talk about differences with curiosity and creative excitement.

A professional gathering like this contains knowledge far beyond what is curated for the stage. Audience members hold intelligence shaped by practice, research, and local conditions. Allowing some form of two-way exchange, increasing the porosity between the stage and the audience, would strengthen the Biennial’s role as a place where the discipline can think collectively, not only display its work. In these act-now times, we must not forget to nurture reflection and critique. We need to talk.

After fifteen years of attending the Biennial, meeting friends old and new and hearing about their latest efforts, I know I am no longer an entirely detached observer. My respect for the team that manages to assemble this event every two years remains immense. I only wish that the too-short, vivid discussions we have over coffee breaks, lunches, and dinners could also take centre stage, invite everyone in, to cultivate and expand our shared language.