LLA
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Landscape architecture as leverage, unlocking situations that planning, economics, and architecture alone cannot resolve.



LLA (Landscapes as Leverage) is a Rotterdam-based landscape architecture practice operating at the intersection of urban strategy, spatial ecology, and material research. It was founded on a single conviction: that landscape architecture is not a finishing layer applied after the real decisions have been made, but a primary catalyst capable of unlocking complex urban, social, and ecological situations from the ground up.

The practice works across scales, from territorial masterplans, to ecological park designs, material prototyping, and private gardens; but scale is never the point. What links the work is a consistent mode of operation: reading a site in its full depth (ecological, historical, political, social), identifying the specific opportunity that no other discipline is addressing, and using landscape as the lever.

This way of working takes time, requires genuine territorial knowledge, and produces proposals that are inevitably partial, because the ecology, the community, and the site continue after the design. LLA treats that partiality not as a limitation but as the condition of honest practice.



What we do, in 3 pillars


Re-entangling




There is a scale at which landscape architecture is a territorial argument, on how a city or region is structured, where its ecological systems run, and what the relationship between the built fabric and its natural foundation. This is the work of long imagination (masterplans, strategic frameworks) and it involves reading across disciplines: urban history, hydrology, socio-economics, ecology.

The projects in this register share a need for re-weaving: rivers and topographies that have become invisible to the city they run through, urban fabrics that have lost their ecological continuity, territories where the relationship between human settlement and non-human landscape process has grown opaque. 

Re-entangling is the attempt to make that relationship legible again, and to find the leverage  where a design proposition can shift it.

Re-wilding




More immediate and more granular. It concerns the specific public space (the school courtyard, the neighbourhood park, the water edge) and the question of what it would take for that space to sustain ecological process alongside human use.

In practice this means specific decisions about surface materials, water managment, planting palettes, ecological successions, and the spatial conditions that allow for both non-human species and for human habits, to develop. Sometimes, it also means a pedagogical dimension: designing observation into the space, building in the conditions under which people might notice what is happening around them.

In this sense, Re-wilding has less to do with a programme of ecological guidelines and more to do with the spatial and material conditions that make attention possible.

Re-rooting




The most intimate scale. It is about the return to ground: to a specific soil, a specific plant, the actual weight and texture of a material being considered. 

This is the work of the experimental garden, of material research, of private garden commissions where propositions developed elsewhere are tested in conditions where the encounter becomes individual.

It is also, inevitably, the work of pedagogy, the transmission of a way of paying attention to material, ecology, behaviours, across generations of students. 

Re-rooting shares with the other two pillars a concern with the particular rather than the general, but it finds that particularity at a scale where individual experience is the measure.



Our method


The working process starts with a reading of the site that precedes the design proposal. This reading draws on ecological survey, historical cartography, the current spatial and social patterns. The ambition is to understand the site's own logic before introducing a new one: its soil and water conditions, the particular relationship between its built edges and its open spaces, the seasonal rhythms that most site visits miss.

This initial reading tends to lengthen the early phase of projects and occasionally produces friction with conventional design timelines. It also uncovers constraints and opportunities that a faster process would skip over such as material already on site that could be reused, an ecological dynamic that a plan could reinforce rather than override, a social pattern of use that the design might accommodate rather than restructure. The proposal emerges from the reading rather than being applied to it.

Across scales, and when possible, LLA grows a research running in parallel to its commissions: material & furniture prototyping and productive plantings in the experimental garden, studio teaching that feeds back into the practice's territorial thinking. These are not separate from the project work, they are the conditions that allow the project work to have something specific to say.



Behind LLA


Philippe Allignet trained at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage in Blois and the Academie van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam. His master's thesis, The Augmented Valley (2020), developed a territorial approach about landscape-led urbanism in deindustrialised mid-sized cities, a line of thinking that continues to run through the practice's larger-scale projects. He founded LLA in Rotterdam in 2024.

His work spans public commissions and intimate research, competition entries and private gardens, built projects and  experiments. A recurring concern connects these registers: the relationship between the speed of design and the much slower speed of ecological process, and the specific decisions (about material, about programme, about the conditions of use and environmental engagment) that either acknowledge that gap or try to hid it.

Since 2014 he has maintained a private research garden in the Creuse valley in France, a site where ecological hypotheses are tested over years rather than design cycles, where things fail without professional consequence, and where the practice's material thinking is grounded before it enters commissions.

Learn more about his practice and the thinking in this interview for NVTL (May 2026).





Teaching


The art of living (all) together

The Achtersluispolder as a laboratory for radical animism
Academie van Bouwkunst Amsterdam | 2026

A tail of two cities

Thinking across borders
Fontys Academy of the Arts | 2025

B(S)XL

The City as a ResourceAcademie van Bouwkunst Rotterdam | 2025

Groundbreaking

The Amsterdam Metropolitan Region’s underground as leverage for resilient futures
Academie van Bouwkunst Amsterdam | 2025

The nitrogen crisis

From an environmental challenge to new forms of coexistenceAcademie van Bouwkunst Amsterdam | 2025

Design after shrinkage

Re-envisionning the future of weaken metropolisesAcademie van Bouwkunst Amsterdam | 2024



Press & Recognition
  • Runner-up | Seoul International Garden Show | 2026

  • Selected garden | International garden festival of Chaumont-sur-Loire | 2024

  • First place | AMITER Idea Competition | 2022

  • Selected garden, Transposable garden award | International garden festival of Chaumont-sur-Loire | 2020

  • Second place | LeNotre Institute student competition | 2017




© LLA 2026