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As part of Carte Blanche XXI, VOGT Landscape Architects temporarily relocate their practice into the Architekturforum Zurich. With Exhibition Office, the exhibition space transforms into a place for design, production, and exchange.
The concept brings together key aspects of VOGT’s working methods — including the Wunderkammer, which explores overarching themes such as biology, geology, and psychology. A large project wall traces the office’s evolution over the past 25 years, presenting projects, research, and experiments not as separate entities, but as an ongoing engagement with ideas, methods, and processes.
A diverse program of activities accompanies the exhibition — including workshops, lectures, and conversations. Exhibition Office serves as an open working environment and a platform for dialogue between practice, research, and the public.
Pillar 01 - Pinboard
Projects by Kienast/Vogt and Vogt Landscape Architects up to 2025 were brought together on a pinboard. They were arranged chronologically, though not visibly labeled as such, revealing the development of the practice.
A further “invisible” layer of organization was based on categories such as biology, geology, and sociology. The pinboard functioned as a method for exploring the office’s own history, identifying guiding motifs, and tracing shifting attitudes.
It was not conceived as a conventional project display in the sense of a catalogue of works, but rather as an image-based perceptual surface, whose overall subjective impression was intended to open up new perspectives on the body of work and its position toward landscape.
Pillar 02 - Wunderkammer
The collection comprised objects from the Wunderkammer with a personal history or a specific design or exhibition context. The objects functioned as instruments of observation, mediums of experience, and representational models. They formed fragmentary representations of real “models” or landscapes in miniature, creating an open framework of thought that connected design, perception, and theory.
The objects invited a sense of wonder, opening up ways to engage with complex relationships within the landscape. They also served, in the on-site work, as sources of inspiration and as tools for design.
Presented at the Carte Blanche XXI Office Exhibition, the diorama acts as both a tool for reproducing and a window onto the landscape. Typically reconstructed within the office environment, it reflects on how we interpret and reimagine the past—posing the question: “So this is what Zurich looked like 300 million years ago?”
Blending AI-generated imagery, artificial plants, and a taxidermy specimen, the work examines the tension between the natural and the artificial. Drawing on scientific knowledge yet grounded in speculation, it invites us to reconsider our position as observers and creators of reconstructed nature.
Pillar 03 – Working on Site
The large worktable was located in the wing in front of the floor-to-ceiling display window. Several workstations with the necessary equipment were set up here. The cabinets served as a spatial extension of the working environment and could be positioned and used as needed. They also embodied various design principles and methodologies at VOGT, inviting visitors to explore different tools and specialized libraries. Those working on site also acted as points of contact for visitors.
Pillar 04 – Events and Network
The exhibition presents itself as an open working environment and a dynamic platform for exchange with experts and the public. Making visible our network built over three decades of design practice with individuals, institutions, and companies is a central aspect of this.
Welcome and introduction by Lorenz Eugster, Member of the Board, Architekturforum Zürich; Maren Brakebusch, Managing Director, VOGT Landscape Architects; Thomas Kissling, Managing Director, VOGT Landscape Architects; and Ascan Mergenthaler, Senior Partner, Herzog & de Meuron.
For Carte Blanche XXI: Exhibition Office at Architekturforum Zurich, artist Julian Charrière presents Tropisme, an installation staging the live cryopreservation of a plant with origins in the Cretaceous era. Inside a hermetically sealed, refrigerated vitrine, the specimen is held within a sheath of ice, as if time could be paused and the plant safeguarded for an unknown future. This fragile, frost-born archive depends entirely on continuous electricity, a delicate balance in which vitality is shielded from entropy and decay.
After the performance, a walkthrough of the exhibition will take place, during which Günther Vogt and Julian Charrière will discuss several of the works on view. This guided tour offers insight into shared methodologies, ongoing research, and the intersections between artistic and landscape practices within the exhibition.
In the Case Studio, design and research are understood as an ongoing process. A clear idea or gesture rarely marks the beginning. Instead, design emerges from observations and experiences in the landscape — gathered in the field and deepened at the desk.
Every landscape reveals its uniqueness through a multitude of natural and anthropogenic features — from flora and geology to form and texture. As landscape architects, we are interested in these specific attributes and how they can be collected and interpreted through site analysis and design.
Join our talk on how we work with pigments and dyes in our practice.
An approach to the use of digital sensing and imaging. Landscape architecture is a discipline that is constantly evolving thanks to technological advances. Digital technologies now play an important role in analysis and design processes as well as in the realization, care, and maintenance of projects and the circularity of components and materials. VOGT researches and identifies digital tools, techniques, and methods and effectively integrates the technologies into practice.
Studio Eidola, based in Zürich and founded in 2020 by industrial designer Denizay Apusoglu and architect Jonas Kissling, operates as a site of interdisciplinary inquiry at the intersection of design, architecture, and material research. The studio’s practice is driven by a commitment to recontextualizing overlooked or discarded materials, with a particular focus on mineral waste and industrial by-products. By engaging with these residual materials, the studio seeks to reveal latent possibilities, proposing new frameworks for their application and meaning.
Save the date: The 21st Carte Blanche will be festively concluded this evening.
Further information will follow.