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A critical spatial practice
In an era defined by perpetual acceleration and urbanisation, architecture and landscape design are continually pushed to speed up, to become generic and more fluid. LLA rejects this premise.
Operating as a porous studio at the intersection of urban strategy, spatial ecology, and material research, we approach the landscape not as a passive backdrop, but as an active lever for socio-ecological resistance.
We provide the strategic frameworks and the physical prototypes necessary to forcefully re-entangle soaring economic and societal fantasies with the finite, unruly reality of the ground.
What we do & who we work with
LLA partners with municipalities, cultural institutions, academic bodies, developers and private who are committed to building structurally anchored, ecologically resilient, and highly tactile environments.
We operate across multiple scales to deliver:
- Urban and territorial masterplanning: waterscape regenerations, post-industrial transitions, and systemic urban restructuring
- Public spaces: designing highly tactile spaces that prioritise ecological continuity and spatial conviviality
- Private parks and gardens: translating ecological researches into deeply intimate scales.
- 1:1 material prototyping & research: executing temporary didactic installations, urban mining research, and pedagogical studios.
Methodology
This practice is driven by three conceptual pillars. These are not literal scales of operation, but philosophical fields of practice that guide our trajectory from theoretical critique down to situated reality: Re-entangling, Re-wilding, and Re-rooting.
Re-entangling
Embracing complexityPhilosophically, to re-entangle is to refuse the isolation of modern development, orchestrating a collision between top-down urban policies and the bottom-up realities of the deep ground. To accompany urbanisation, we use its inertia as our primary design tool.
Translated into space, this means designing the structural commons through comprehensive masterplanning. We harmonise the spatial reality with its environment by restructuring urbanism, redefining mobility flows, weaving continuous green structures and public spaces that directly answer the specific problematics of the site. We design the frameworks that hold open the space for a more equal and sustainable reality.
Re-wilding
Towards a situated animismRe-wilding is not the literal planting of greenery; it is a shift in spatial ethics. Moving beyond the modernist separation of Nature and Culture, we aims for a situated animism, bringing a sense of equality between humans and non-humans.
Translated into space, this is where LLA’s language is felt, breaking the asphalt, rewilding manicured surfaces to design unruly, productive environments. By framing raw ecology with a strong formal design approach, we create spaces of deep conviviality.
Crucially, this pillar is driven by the human dimension: LLA design transformative encounters between people and the non-human world, fostering a visceral, daily awareness of our shared ecology. The landscape becomes an index, translating hidden agencies into shared public and pedagogic experiences.
Re-rooting
Prototyping on matter, ecology and practicesPhilosophical leverage and ecological ethics cannot be sustained as abstract concepts. To re-root is to mandate a return to the wild. Grounded in the experimental LLAb, academic studios, and private garden commissions, it is our fundamental research engine.
Translated into space, it is about prototyping with material & furniture, questionning temporalitis with maintenance practices, spontaneous & indigenous vegetation, and observing ecological succession.
It is equally a space for professional, social and aesthetic prototyping. Through hands-on pedagogy and community engagement, LLA investigates how people interact with unruly environments, proposing the new aesthetic codes of the Anthropocene.
Behind LLA
Philippe Allignet is a landscape-architect graduated from the Amsterdam Academie van Bouwkunst in 2020. He worked various offices across the Netherlands (H+N+S+, BOOM, OKRA) before founding LLA.
His personal practice started before the creation of LLA. He tested and refined his design approach at different scales on the side through manifesto gardens (2020, 2024 in Chaumont sur Loire) and landscape-based vision competitions (2017 - the LeNotre institute student competition | 2022 - Amiter idea competition).
Besides these activity, he also engaged in education in various academies accross the Netherlands to this day.