Anette Freytag is an award-winning scholar, educator and critic and a professor of the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. Photo credit: Urska Skerl.
The International Landscape Architecture platform, LANDEZINE, featured Rutgers faculty Anette Freytag in May. Here is the interview, reproduced with permission.
Professor Anette Freytag is a relentless researcher, moving between academia, activism, and public engagement. She taught at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, and the Technical University of Innsbruck before joining Rutgers University, where she is the Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. Freytag is the author of award-winning books. For The Landscapes of Dieter Kienast, she received J. B. Jackson Book Prize in 2022. The Gardens of La Gara received the European Garden Book Award in 2019.
French School of Bern by Stöckli, Kienast & Koeppel © gta Archiv/ETH Zürich, Dieter Kienast© gta Archiv/ETH Zürich, Dieter Kienast.
Freytag’s research focuses on designed landscapes from the 19th century to the contemporary practice with a particular focus on topology, phenomenology, and walking. In 2019, she co-founded the Arts Integration Research Collaborative (AIR), which prioritizes creative placemaking to foster spatial justice through projects that seek safe access to nature for all.
In the interview, we touch on the topics of traversing different cultural backgrounds, landscape ideas, working with students, wellbeing and care. Her approach and a broad background in work and studies make her an invaluable source, which is why it is even more significant, she has lately turned her attention to small-scale actions, community work and activism.
Currently, you are teaching the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University. Prior, you were teaching at the ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, and at the Technical University and the University of Innsbruck, but your professional work encompasses much more. You are also a researcher, activist, author, and critic, engaging in numerous international projects. Perhaps explain the background that allows you to crisscross continents and penetrate the profession from a different angle than taught from a landscape architecture design and practice perspective.
Thank you for this generous perception of my work! I think there are various moments in my earlier education that led the way to this development. I was trained as a journalist at the age of 15 and worked first for the youth radio of the Austrian National Broadcasting Company (ORF), later for their culture and society department. I stopped at age 35, when I entered academia by starting a doctoral thesis at ETH Zurich. I loved working for the radio; it gave me access to many interesting people and locations. I was allowed to ask any questions I had in mind, and I then translated my experience through audio features to a broader audience. I learned to listen – not only to people but also to landscapes and cities, to their stories and their sounds. This has certainly laid the groundwork for my interest in phenomenology and my investigative curiosity.
My academic studies were another determining factor. I was always a political person and loved architecture and art. When I moved to Vienna, I studied, on the one hand, macroeconomics, on the other hand, a wild mix of art history, philosophy, and music. With the first cohort of Austrian Erasmus students, I went to study in Berlin just three years after “die Wende,” when Potsdamer Platz still looked like in the 1987 Wim Wenders Film Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire). I researched and wrote my master’s thesis on twentieth-century urban parks in Paris, again with a stipend, and this is when I came into landscape architecture and never left.
Courtyard of Swiss Re (Now Bank Vontobel) in Zurich by Kienast Vogt Partner © Georg Aerni.
My scholarly methods and processes are fed by the following sources: the very descriptive, analytic, deductive methods of the Vienna School of Art History; the contact with psychoanalysis and constructive realism in Vienna as well as studying deconstructivism and postmodernism with Peter Engelmann, who published the German translations of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard in his Passagen Verlag. The fact that I entered the realm of landscape architecture and landscape thinking through the French language and French culture while living in Paris and already knowing a bit of the German scholarly literature on garden art and discovering the Anglo-Saxon scholarship made me forever aware how different the approaches to landscape thinking and its scholarly outputs are due to cultural differences. To this day, I think that a project like Duisburg Nord could only have emerged in Germany as much as the Parc de La Villette could only have been built in France. One country openly showing the wounds and contamination inflicted by the industrial age, the other erasing them; one concept emerging in a country that was all about acknowledging and facing its past, the other in a society equipped with self-confidence and certitude drawn from nothing less than the French Revolution. My scholarly work, be it on Vienna around 1900, German WWI cemeteries, my cultural heritage preservation work, or my research on postmodern and contemporary landscape architecture, has been coined by this education.
The North American culture is yet another beast that I have been studying for eight years now: a strange mix of unwavering optimism and the belief in the blank slate, framed by incredible violence that is literally baked into this society. In this context, the wonderful diversity of Rutgers University and the State of New Jersey has clearly awakened my activist self and driven me to found the Arts Integration Research (AIR) Collaborative in 2019 that promotes safe access to nature for all through strategies of arts integration and creative placemaking.
Perhaps what you can observe from a distance or in simultaneity of work in both European and the U.S. systems and histories has enabled you to form a critical view of design, what it encodes, or shuts out.
March to Rutgers Gardens, September 2021, with 500 participants and GirlTrek. Photo: John Evans.
That is a good question, but a very difficult one to answer. When I was living and working in Europe, I used to say that it makes no sense to consider garden history as a moral history. I was fascinated by analyses like Derrida’s Memoirs for Paul de Man, where he asks the question: “What shall be done with the findings of an esteemed author once he is found guilty of collaboration with the Vichy regime?” What is still valid from his texts, from his scholarly work, and how must we think differently about it, now that we know? I always felt compelled to discuss the pain and exploitation that have led to grandiose European monuments of garden art. But in the beginnings of my research and teaching there was not even consistent scholarly research on how the exorbitant profits of the Transatlantic Slave Trade or the atrocious exploitation of the Belgian Congo, to name just two examples, have led to gardens like André le Nôtre’s Vaux-le-Vicomte, Capability Brown’s design for the park of the Castle of Laeken in Brussels and its expansive glass houses, as well as all of the public parks and promenades of Brussels that the city residents love to this day. It is a different but also not so much different story with figures like Frederick Law Olmsted and Ian McHarg. Yes, their work is very problematic and fantastic and groundbreaking at the same time.
My years in the U.S. have been very revelatory and educational, and truly changed me. Some of my European colleagues deplore that they now must deal with “woke shit,” even though “Europeans have unlike the US no plantations in their back yards.” Clearly, the Europeans did not have plantations in their backyards because they preferred the dirty business to be handled outside of Europe, which was exactly the point, but the profits were taken and used. My personal way to deal with this dilemma is to contextualize honestly and fearlessly, and teach the painful history that led and that leads to this day, to great works of landscape architecture for the sake of educating a new generation of designers. I am especially interested in showcasing works of designers who go down different paths. This is the reason why I approached Landezine to publish on the work of the landscape architects Sara Zewde and Elizabeth J Kennedy, who both have firms in New York City. Both studied a lot of painful history. New approaches, forms, and processes came out of it. Apart from my “slow burner” work on books, I am currently going back to my journalistic beginnings, and I have a great appetite to write and publish smaller pieces on designers whose work brings something different to the field, something utterly relevant.
One of the core assumptions behind Topology, which you developed in collaboration with Christophe Girot and your former colleagues at ETH, many of whom you continue to work with—is that form is essential to both our physical and mental wellbeing. It suggests that form, function, and meaning are inseparable in shaping our environment. Alongside biophilia, which describes our innate affinity for life and interspecies connection, topophilia reflects our deep-rooted attachment to place.
In light of ongoing global transformations and large-scale landscape restructurings beyond food production, how is your understanding of topology evolving? Why, in your view, is form so critical—and at what scale? Is a meaningful, legible landscape opposed to the idea of a non-place, or is everything part of a continuous “point-cloud”?
As a professor at ETH with access to extraordinary resources, Christophe Girot had a unique instinct for assembling teams to advance landscape architecture research and education, often through cutting-edge technologies. While his primary interest was in large-scale planning, he knew how to connect it to small-scale thinking. He structured his chair into several Labs—Theory, Media, Design, and later, the Landscape Visualization and Modelling Lab—with three to five members in each. Around ten years into his tenure, and after I had been working with him for some time, I suggested we showcase the work these Labs were producing. Topology was always a collective endeavor, and in 2011, we formalized it with a name and began a series of books and conferences to communicate our shared research.
Authors: Anette Freytag, Christophe Girot, Albert Kirchengast, Suzanne Krizenecky and Dunja Richter.
The focus on form giving, the creation of relationships, and the combination of a set of tools to designing and representing landscape projects at all scales (including sand boxes, CNC milling, point-cloud models, video and film, as well as the acoustic dimension of landscape architecture) had three main goals:
First, reconnecting urban design to the terrain and to nature for the sake of the wellbeing of all living species that, together, form an environment. This included enhancing orientation, legibility and the feeling of presence and feeling alive in a landscape. This was achieved through form giving (especially topography and spatial organization), the choice of materials and plants. Second, to enhance interdisciplinary work but under the guidance of landscape thinking; the competencies of landscape architects (like understanding plants, constant change, creating works that appeal to all senses and fostering mental and physical health) should be the leading principles for all other disciplines. Third, through these (here only very briefly) sketched out approaches, designers/planners/users shall develop an understanding of nature that is larger than functional, such as its qualification as ecosystem services, and thus develop a relationship of care. It shall bring a turn in approaching climate change effects like flooding, the overheating of cities, to name only two, and react through innovative approaches; designs for floodings, renaturations, massively bringing plants back into cities, unsealing surfaces, understanding gardening as a transformative practice, and much more.
The focus on form is not about aesthetics in terms of beauty, but in the sense of the knowledge creation and transformation that aesthetics may bring for survival. Nothing less than survival is at stake when following the maxims of this theory. At past occasions, the Topology project was misunderstood as fetishizing technology like point-cloud models without a specific reason or content. But all the named tools like walking, drawing, using audio and video, sandboxes, CNC milled models, UAV generated imagery, and point-cloud models for the design of landscapes at all scales has one primary goal: to reconnect the designers to the terrain and foster the understanding of the characteristics and conditions of the specific place and region they are designing for. For example, to foster a topological approach to the design of landscapes that are dominated by infrastructure, one first needs to understand their complexity. The virtual point cloud model provides a new way of getting a physical understanding of such landscapes because this model is different from others. One can move within the terrain by moving through the virtual model. It is possible to make sections wherever you want. For a landscape intervention, sections provide the most important information to understand a landscape and model it. With these instruments, designers can grasp the physis of a landscape with unprecedented precision. Once you have been trained to use the laser scanner and the software, you are able to produce such models within three days. For me, these instruments create an understanding of the physicality of a landscape and a possibility of physical localization, which makes them quite different from typical urban planning models with a view from above. To unlearn this “eye of god” view that has been with us since the Renaissance is one of the central challenges and one reason why I am so obsessed with walking.
Spatial justice is a wider problematic you approach with different doings – one is by critically comparing the past and current planning approaches, and the other by activist actions.
You co-founded Arts Integration Research (AIR) Collaborative, which focuses on bringing spatial justice to the forefront by engaging with communities in outdoor actions, specifically walking, accompanied by artistic interventions. You aim to promote accessibility to nature and connectivity. You are developing strategies for how academic research can trickle down to the public. How to build love towards topology and biosphere, resulting in topo- and biophilia? Through sharing knowledge, can academia do that?
Universal Access Garden Pilot designed and built by students of Construction II. Instructors: Vincent Javet and Han Yan. Photo: Anette Freytag.
Yes, academia can do this, I am fully convinced. And it must be done. Since 2021, when we came back on campus in person, about twelve courses and over 300 students have been exposed to AIR collaborative style of experiential learning. What the arts and humanities produce serves as a conduit for knowledge in our daily lives, beyond the traditional academic sense of knowledge absorption: Our students learn about their communities by walking them, talking with their neighbors, and interacting with the layers of space, sound, and people beneath their daily routes. We are always building our courses on local histories and landscapes, and we aim to create opportunities for people to engage with the spaces around them.
In one set of projects and courses, students have been learning about the needs of people with disabilities who want to garden. In consequence, they have been designing and building pilot gardens for people of all abilities. On other occasions, students learned how local communities in the neighborhood of Rutgers University have little to no access to fresh produce and green space. I have taught and co-taught the power of walking and listening, and how a daily walk can change your life. Science students have been encouraged to hone their creativity to communicate scientific data and research through Zines, storytelling, short videos, drawings, or TikTok dances to address and appeal to audiences outside the university. It has been a lot of fun, and we have been working hard to break through the digital world of these students and make them feel more alive and engaged and wanting to be of service to their respective communities. In course evaluations, students gave feedback that they had no idea one could touch on so many topics and fields of research and action through walking and that they felt they had learned how to observe and experience their surroundings and thus “live again”. We are all operating in such a complex and depressing world that we desperately try to navigate. These mostly small interventions that we seek to make with AIR collaborative projects to enhance access to nature for all give the students and us hope. No work has ever been as hard as my community-engaged work, and no work has ever been as rewarding.
Lastly, let’s mention your authorship in numerous award-winning books – Topology: Topical Thoughts on the Contemporary Landscape, you co-edited with Christophe Girot, Dunja Richter and Albert Kirchengast, you edited and co-authored The Gardens of La Gara in three language editions, and you have written The Landscapes of Dieter Kienast, which is a heavy-volume study into the work of one of the most influential landscape architects whose 80th birthday would be this year. What can we expect further?
The Gardens of La Gara by Anette Freytag (Ed.)
I was very lucky to have been approached by Christophe Girot to do a dissertation about the incredibly rich work and life of Dieter Kienast, and by Rémy and Verena Best, to publish a book on their magnificent 18th century manor La Gara. I have spent about ten years on the research and writing of each book, and luckily, the publishers brought them out in several language editions. When you dedicate to a research and publication project, it is crucial that you do it with the best material and topic possible. I have learned so much and I have enjoyed every moment of it. It is hard to believe that Dieter Kienast would only have turned 80 this October. He passed so young and nevertheless left such an incredible œuvre of gardens, courtyards, parks, and cemeteries, but also many essays that are still highly relevant for the field and fun to read. He truly changed landscape architecture forever. To show how meaningful his work still is – be it his love for spontaneous urban vegetation, the inspiration he drew from children’s play and contemporary authors and playwrights, his close collaboration with architects and artists, or his way of developing a vocabulary for the landscape, in both design and representation – I am planning to host a tribute to him at either Rutgers or Princeton University on his 80th birthday on Thursday, October 30, 2025. I am also giving two free guided tours on his works, one in Bern on June 25 and one in Zurich on July 11.
Since the foundation of AIR Collaborative in 2019, I got the taste of collaborative work, and the benefit of persistent exchange with colleagues. The various projects advance slowly but surely. Currently, I am working on a manual on Agglowandern (Walking in Suburbia) with my Swiss research partners, the spatial planner Anne Brandl and the architect Caspar Schärer. For five years, the three of us promoted the benefits of hikes in urban sprawl. The manual we work on now is dedicated to policy makers and planners and explores why and how to change administrative and planning practices through hiking in Swiss Agglomerations. Our working title is Hike now! Why planning and climate protection need more knowledge gained from practice and experience (to be published in German, Verlag Hochparterre, 2026). At the end of June, we are going to present our intermediate findings in Kassel at a convention dedicated to Lucius Burckhardt, a Swiss Macroeconomist and renowned critic of urban design, who would have turned 100 years, and who founded the science of walking – Promenadolology.
Together with architect Philipp Urech and sound artist Nadine Schütz, both former ETH colleagues, we’re planning a Landscape Topology Reader—a collection of essays from those advancing this theory in practice. Two other projects are just launching: one explores walking and the chemo-sensorial experience of landscape, in collaboration with Rutgers taste-and-smell expert Paul Breslin; the other supports the effort to list Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House as a National Historic Landmark. And, of course, If I could clone myself, there would be even more to come.
