SITE SEER

How Belgian architect Bas Smets is pioneering the landscape of the future

- ELLIE STATHAKI

You might expect a landscape architect to put plants at the heart of their universe.

In a sense, Bas Smets, one of the industry's pioneering thinkers, does that, too, but it's the triptych of philosophy, art and science that forms his true north star. Perhaps it's because landscapes are ever-changing – their very idea evolving over time and history – but also, as nature is alive and therefore a moving target, it physically morphs into something different every day. 'You need to understand a site and work with it, and realise that it is not in a state of 'being', but it's in a constant state of 'becoming', the Belgian landscape architect says. In this fluid and dynamic condition, references are needed, and while you might not immediately associate these three areas of culture and knowledge with landscape, to Smets, they are intrinsically linked.

'Landscape is a philosophy,' he says. 'It's about understanding how to live on this planet. What is more philosophical than that? French philosopher Alain Roger said the land, the phase zero of a site, becomes a landscape through an artistic intervention, so art plays a key role here, too. In fact, the first recording of the use of the word 'landscape' was by the painters from the Low Countries in the 16th century – it's borrowed from the Dutch word 'landschap', which was first used to speak about a new genre in painting.' Landscape is, above all, a mental construction, a way of organising the elements of the 'land'. It is a concept that Smets has elaborated on and researched extensively for publications and exhibitions, including curating shows in 2016 and 2019 in Brussels' Bozar art centre on both the history of notions of landscape and landscape within painting (in particular, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's work).