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A critical spatial practice
In an era defined by perpetual acceleration and weightless urbanisation, architecture and landscape design are continually pushed to speed up, to become lighter, faster, and more fluid. LLA rejects this premise.
Operating as a porous studio at the intersection of urban strategy, spatial ecology, and material research, we do not build to facilitate smooth, speculative flows.
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 fantasies with the finite, unruly reality of the ground.What we do & who we work with
LLA partners with visionary municipalities, cultural institutions, academic bodies, progressive 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: navigating river confluences, 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 our ecological research 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
Philosophically, 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, and weaving continuous green structures and public spaces that directly answer the specific problematics of the site.
By piercing through bureaucratic "paper realities," we build heavy, immutable anchors that stabilise vulnerable territories against physical subsidence and speculative displacement. We design the frameworks that hold open the space for a more equal reality. In Practice: St-Etienne productive ecosystem
We applied this strategy to restructure a heavily paved, fragmented urban environment. The tools of re-entanglement here were large-scale urban mapping, the strategic realignment of mobility corridors, and the deployment of continuous green infrastructures. By shifting the macroscopic urban grid, we forced a new, ecologically grounded order onto the city.
Re-wilding
Towards a situated animismRewilding is not the literal planting of greenery; it is a shift in spatial ethics. Moving beyond the modernist separation of Nature and Culture, we practice a
Translated into space, this is where LLA’s architectural language is felt. We break the asphalt and reject sterile, manicured surfaces to design unruly, productive environments. By framing raw ecology with heavy, vernacular materials, we create spaces of deep conviviality.
Crucially, this pillar is driven by the human dimension: we design transformative encounters between people and the non-human world, fostering a visceral, daily awareness of our shared ecology. Here, the landscape becomes an Index, translating hidden infrastructure and environmental consequences into shared public experiences.
In Practice: Balzac high school rewilding
To change the spatial ethics of this institution, the tools we used were visceral and highly tactile. We utilized mechanical depaving to shatter the sterile schoolyard asphalt, inserting complex, indigenous planting matrices and heavy, vernacular stone seating. This intervention orchestrated a direct, daily encounter between the students and a newly productive, unruly ecosystem.
Re-rooting
Prototyping on matter, ecologyPhilosophical leverage and ecological ethics cannot be sustained as abstract concepts. To re-root is to mandate a return to the dirt. Grounded in our experimental LLAb, our academic studios, and our private garden commissions, this is our fundamental research engine.
Translated into space, this looks like design by maintenance and 1:1 prototyping, but this prototyping goes far beyond inert materials. We test the active thresholds of living matter, foraging spontaneous vegetation, cultivating indigenous matrices, and observing ecological succession. It is equally a space for social and aesthetic prototyping.
Through hands-on pedagogy and community engagement, we investigate how people interact with unruly environments, defining the new aesthetic codes of the Anthropocene. By engaging in urban mining and testing both material decay and plant growth, we ensure our high-level theories are rigorously proven in the physical world.
In our laboratory and pedagogical studios, the tools of re-rooting are direct and un-romanticised. We use urban mining to forage discarded city waste, like reclaimed asphalt slabs and raw stone, and physically pair them with pioneer species like Sichuan pepper. Using continuous maintenance tools and 1:1 scale stacking, we prototype the exact material decay and aesthetic unruliness that will later define our public parks.
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.
Ultimately, LLA operates as a porous studio, treating every project as an open platform for collective intelligence. By bridging the gap between theoretical research and technical reality, we merge the expertise of ecologists, engineers, and local stakeholders. This multidisciplinary approach ensures that our 'Wilderness by Design' is not just a poetic concept, but a resilient, functioning system rooted in the social and ecological fabric of its place.