Winner of the 2026 WLA Awards – Award of Excellence in the University Studio category
How can we cultivate sensitivity toward Iceland’s fragile landscapes and unique biodiversity? What can we learn by inhabiting the lifeways of birds?
BECOMING BIRDS is a design studio that explores a multispecies pedagogy through embodied, collective, and sensory learning. Participants inhabit the lifeways of migratory birds as a design methodology, engaging with avian perspectives to understand ecological relationships and imagine new forms of coexistence. These lived experiences are interpreted through contextual design proposals and habitat strategies, translating ecological knowledge into territorial interventions. Conceived as a living laboratory for research, exploration, and education, the studio positions design as a process of learning with living systems, where empathy, observation, and site-immersion become tools for ecological awareness.
Andakíll Bird Sanctuary: Territory & Site Context
Iceland’s fragile landscapes, shaped by sub-Arctic conditions, emerge through the dynamic interaction of water, land, and climate, creating unique ecosystems that serve as essential habitats for migratory birds.
The studio is situated in the Andakíll Bird Sanctuary, a Ramsar wetland within western Iceland’s Borgarfjörður fjord system, where glacial rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean. As an important stop along planetary bird migration routes, Andakíll provides the ideal setting for exploring the delicate relationships between biodiversity, hydrological processes, and human presence.
Learning Approach
Bringing together students from landscape architecture and environmental and earth sciences, the studio operates as a short-term, immersive laboratory centered around shared authorship, interdisciplinary exchange, and collective decision-making. Participants contribute their distinct disciplinary expertise while engaging in a relational practice emerging through dialogue, observation, and direct engagement with place.
The studio cultivates site awareness through bird life, migration, and habitat dynamics while exploring coexistence as a framework for design. Through hand drawing, cartographic exploration, model making with found materials, collage, first-person narratives, performative actions, and sound recordings, participants develop manual and sensory ways of reading the landscape, where interpretation becomes knowledge and process translates into a design outcome.
Studio Process | From Becoming to Designing
The studio unfolds through four interconnected phases:
- Being On-Site – Participants engage directly with the landscape through walking, observation, and documentation of ecological relationships.
- Becoming Bird – Participants embody a migratory bird through first-person narratives, bird visages, and performative actions, experiencing migration, nesting, feeding, and habitat conditions from the avian perspective.
- Mapping Migration Journeys – A collective world map woven with threads traces migratory routes, revealing the planetary ecological networks connected to Andakíll.
- Designing from the Bird – Embodied experience is interpreted into contextual habitat strategies and landscape design proposals.
Habitat & Landscape Strategies
Projects respond to four interconnected environments within the Andakíll landscape—river delta, wetlands, agricultural fields, and settlements—through low-impact interventions including habitat restoration, seasonal protection zones, interpretive trails, observation structures, ecological storytelling, and pathways that strengthen relationships between species, landscape, and time.
Reflection
By tracing ecological processes and migratory routes through embodied and collective practices, the studio frames landscape architecture as a process of listening, interpreting, and responding to environmental conditions. It proposes design as a multispecies practice that cultivates ecological awareness and opens new possibilities for inhabiting landscapes through coexistence and care.
Becoming Birds: Iceland Coexistence
University: Agricultural University of Iceland | Landscape Architecture | Faculty of Planning & Design
Supervisors: Ivan Juarez & Helena Guttormsdóttir
Students:
Studio Group 1: Ambroise Desnos, Dorothea Bittmann, Edda Björg Eiríksdóttir, Hekla Rán Kjartansdóttir, Ingibjörg Huld Þórðardóttir, Karl Trausti Björnsson, Klara Sól Freeman, Lovisa Olsson, Marco Augris, Nína Berglind Sigtryggsdóttir, Prakash B.K., Rannveig María Björnsdóttir, Runólfur Þorláksson, Shaun Wesley, Timéo Sibila, Þórhildur María Kristinsdóttir. Collaboration Mentor: Nanna Vilborg
Studio Group 2: Adéla Jílková, Adrian Bornschein, Antonia Neuendorf, Birta Dís Hilmarsdóttir, Caroline Ziane, Charlotte Maskow, Fanny Bergwall Johansson, Hermann Haukur Aspar, Hulda Hjartardóttir, Jason Máni Guðmundsson, Jóhanna Rut Arndísardóttir, Kristján K. Vattnes Ingólfsson, Lou-rose Natella Clémentine Le Pelve, Louise Suzanne Le Moing, Luise Scholz, Magdalena Maria Mokrzan, Max Fesel, Noa Sophie Odenbach
Images: Courtesy of Agricultural University of Iceland
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