IFLA recently announced Adriaan Geuze as the winner of the IFLA Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award 2022 at an Award Ceremony during the 58th IFLA World Congress in Gwangju, Korea on August 31, 2022.
The jury unanimously agreed that “Adriaan Geuze is one of the most significant landscape architects in the world today.” Through the broad range of built projects worldwide, his firm’s works have achieved a balance of concept and practice that have changed the relationship between cities, nature, and people, and creatively transformed the relationship between urban life and urban ecology. Adriaan Geuze’s outstanding contributions to the promotion of the profession in conceptual and practical respects represent the best values of the IFLA world community.
Upon accepting the award, Adriaan recognised the West 8 studio, the clients and communities of the academic field, and the giants of Landscape Architecture.
Adriaan Geuze is the founder and director of West 8, which focuses on landscape architecture, urban design, and infrastructure projects. Under Geuze’s leadership, West 8 has completed more than two hundred projects, in over 60 countries spanning four continents. It has created innovative designs based on a critical approach to landscape architecture, planning, and innovation in the public realm, which have inspired many designers from different disciplines. Geuze has stretched the boundaries of landscape architecture. From an academic perspective, Geuze has made important contributions to the education of generations of landscape architects in courses taught across the world. Beyond his professional and academic accomplishments, Geuze also takes prominent and active positions within societal debates on landscape and design. All of these contribute to making Geuze one of the foremost and most inspiring landscape architects worldwide.
“The philosophy of West 8 is deeply rooted in a systemic approach to life sciences compared to narrative: engineer meets poet. This 21st century approach allows West 8 to interweave function, engineering, sustainability, symbolism, expression and both the vulnerability and the euphoria of mass culture. Landscape, infrastructure, nature, and historical legacy coalesce to form vital constituents of our cities. Across all of West 8’s work, the analysis of the unseen logics – ecology, infrastructure, water and soil conditions, building programs and people – has enabled the designs to be at the forefront of sustainability, ecological sensitivity and resiliency. All these designs breath timelessness, local culture, and the desire to occupy, play and explore. Public Space, has become a dominant subject for the field of Landscape Architecture profession, and today demands a proactive attitude: to engineer softscape and shade against the hardscape; to speak out for the public and free spaces against the commercialisation of the urban realm; to veto against traffic dominated streetscapes and to campaign for pedestrian-friendly cities in their place and, above all, create an inclusive and welcoming environment for all user groups to engage.”
– Adriaan Geuze
Cover Image: Adriaan Geuze Portrait©Maaike Engels