The project upcycles all materials removed from the site, including approximately 10 tonnes of concrete pavers and gravel. The pavers form a sculptural edge that gives the SUPERBLUMe its distinctive identity, while reclaimed quarry stones create a loosely laid pathway. The intervention introduces nutrient-rich soil, expands the root space of the existing Ginkgo trees, and creates an additional 30 m² of permeable ground around them.

By increasing organic matter, the project supports microbial activity and below-ground biodiversity, fostering a porous, living lithosphere that facilitates water storage and groundwater recharge. Its gently undulating topography channels rainwater toward a central depression composed of sand, gravel, and soil, creating the potential to infiltrate approximately 1,700 liters during a one-hour heavy rainfall event of around 30 mm.

Deadwood piles, sand lenses, a stone birdbath, a decaying root wad, sand and gravel mounds, and nitrogen-fixing and ruderal vegetation create diverse microhabitats for year-round nesting, feeding, and shelter. Together with the existing Ginkgo trees, the rich textures, porous surfaces, and micro-shadows contribute to thermal regulation, offering a climatic refuge during periods of extreme summer heat. As a biodiversity hotspot, its carefully crafted material composition expresses a sense of care and wonder, inviting residents to connect with the richness of multispecies life. The project also engages the local community through on-site discussions and participatory planting activities.

Conceived as a small-scale, replicable intervention adaptable to different urban contexts, SUPERBLUMe embodies the three core values of the New European Bauhaus: sustainability, togetherness, and beauty. Its name expresses a living-systems approach, transforming an overheated paved surface into a place where water, nutrients, soil, microorganisms, vegetation, animals, and people interact and flourish together. It demonstrates how a network of small, carefully designed interventions can contribute to living, climate-adapted urban spaces across the city.

Client and Institutional Partners: Gemeinnützige Wohnungsbaugesellschaft (GWG) GmbH, Ingolstadt Stadt Ingolstadt – Stadtplanungsamt, Stabsstelle Nachhaltigkeit

Team: Silvia Benedito (partner), Daniella Slowick

Landscape Contractor: Garten und Ideen, with Florian Staub and Florian Glosser, Ingolstadt

With the Support of: Paul Melia (Landscape Architect, GWG) and
Dr. Doris Maurer (Head of Green Spaces and Biodiversity, GWG)

Photos: Florian Glosser

At its core is a permeable communal green space that acts as social, climatic, and hydrological infrastructure. It supports daily collective life through shared gardens, children’s areas, a communal kitchen and oven, laundry and a water tank, resting zones, and informal gathering spaces. All units and circulation are oriented toward this interior landscape, extending living spaces through terraces and gallery-balconies, and fostering exchange between residents within a naturally cross-ventilated environment.

The housing is conceived as a co-living community, combining compact private units with large shared spaces for informal interaction, intergenerational living, and mutual support. The units are based on a 3 m × 11.5 m structural module, derived from the structural frame and parking geometry, allowing adaptable unit types through addition or reduction of the module. Kitchens and bathrooms are aligned as shared service cores between units to optimize construction costs and promote adaptability. The first floor of the housing blocks is made in locally sourced granite blocks, while the upper levels use a CLT timber structural system, enabling lighter construction and modular assembly.

The project emphasizes ecological performance and biodiversity protection through rainwater harvesting, infiltration gardens, and underground cisterns integrated with the semi-underground garage, ensuring resilience to increasing drought conditions. Climatically, the courtyard-garden works as a passive system for ventilation, shading, and temperature regulation.

Overall, the proposal creates a resilient, integrated living environment where architecture, landscape, intergenerational exchange, and ecology operate as one caring assemblage.

Team: Silvia Benedito (partner) with Telmo Cruz (co-architect), Marcus Eichermüller and Daniella Slowik
Engineers Structural, Water, Electricity and Fire Safety: ECA Projects, Lda / Eng. Paulo Sampaio

The name of the installation was inspired by Martin Heidegger and his use of the term Lichtung, describing a clearing in which matter becomes perceptible, enabling one’s awareness of self and being-in-the-world. The project reveals and amplifies the atmospheric conditions of the alluvial forest—light, humidity, temperature, scent, and sound—as one moves along the riverside pathway. Seven clearings are positioned along the route, each attuned to shifting environmental conditions such as time of day, shade intensity, humidity gradients, and walking pace. These spaces encourage visitors to slow down, pause, and contemplate the changing atmosphere of the alluvial forest.

In each clearing lies a large-scale bench inviting visitors to sit or lie comfortably while experiencing the transformations of the humid atmosphere. Carefully crafted from hand-sculpted molds, the benches resemble oversized tree stumps, referencing the primordial forests of Bavaria. Although inspired by natural forms, the objects are intentionally distinguished from their surroundings through their exaggerated scale and golden hue. Appearing as uncanny artifacts within the Danubian floodplain, their thermal mass absorbs daytime warmth, creating a microclimate that encourages longer, more comfortable occupation of the space.

A field of yellow-painted tree trunks marks the project’s southern and northern entryways, extending the installation’s dialogue between landscape, infrastructure, and atmospheric perception. The painted height registers the elevation of a nearby dike constructed to protect the eastern neighborhoods of Ingolstadt from seasonal flooding.

Team: Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler (partners), Emily Schlickmann (Project Manager), Marcus Eichermüller, Marissa Angell, Hope Strode, Gabriella Solange
Fotos: Jann Averwerser

Team: Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler (partners)
Larissa Belcic, Lauren Seowon Choi, Nicholas Jungblut, Dohyun Lee, Yixin Li 
Carson Booth, Parawee Wachirabuntoon, Estello-Cisdre Raganit, Amanda Ton, Jena Tegeler, Zeqi Liu
Tim McDowd, Gabriella Solange Rodriguez-Berrios, Alison Malouf, Euipoom Estelle Yoon

Thermal Engineering:
TRANSSOLAR: Matthias Schuler, Peter Zatko, Phillip Kunze, Felix Thumm, Pratik Raval

Structural Engineering:
 KNIPPERS HELBIG; Thorsten Helbig, Florian Meier, Ruben Heiming, Huberst Chang

Engineering Consultant:
 KIPPKITTS; Kipp Bradford

Visualisations:
 LUXIGON, Eric de Broche des Combe

The project considers geological heritage as part of a living landscape in which geology, water, soil, climate, vegetation, wildlife, and human activities are closely connected. Located at the foothills of Rocha da Pena, an imposing limestone formation and protected natural monument, the project brings together the site's ancient geological history, karst formations, water infrastructure, native vegetation, and fossil records to establish a long-term strategy for the regeneration and stewardship of this remarkable landscape.

The Masterplan combines ecological regeneration, geological interpretation, and public use across the 150-hectare site in a series of building phases. The careful grading of the terrain directs rainwater into a network of retention and infiltration basins and rain gardens, allowing water to be collected, naturally filtered, and absorbed into the soil. These interventions reduce erosion, improve soil conditions, and support the regeneration of native vegetation, including dwarf palms (Chamaerops humilis), cork oaks (Quercus suber), and shrubs such as rockroses, heathers, and rosemary. Historic and new trails guide visitors across different elevations, connecting former sea levels, geological formations, fossil deposits, and traces of ancient life. Changes in elevation help visitors understand the site's geological history, while gardens, gathering spaces, and geological markers make this history visible and accessible.

At the heart of the masterplan, the “Grotto-Cathedral” Interpretation Center is conceived as a series of spaces excavated into the existing hilly terrain. Its architecture draws on the geological layers of the site and the Algarve's long tradition of building with earth and stone, such as Grés de Silves, using locally available materials and adapting to the region's climate. High-thermal-mass walls, deep thresholds of dappled light and shade, naturally ventilated courtyards, and integrated water cisterns combine vernacular construction principles with advanced bioclimatic strategies to reduce heat gains and enhance thermal comfort during extreme heat summer.

The building's section takes visitors on a journey through geological time, from spaces once occupied by ancient waters to the mountain's older rock formations. At a key moment, a large opening frames the sky and the top of Rocha da Pena, connecting the ancient water with the geological formations visible beyond. This encounter brings different periods of the landscape's history together in one space, allowing visitors to experience geological time through architecture, light, material, and the surrounding landscape.

The project was included among the flagship proposals supporting the successful candidacy of Algarvensis for designation as a UNESCO Global Geopark.

Client and Institutional Partners: Municipality of Loulé, Algarve, Portugal
Associação Geoparque Algarvensis (AGA), Non-Profit Association

Team: Silvia Benedito (Partner), Daniella Slowick

Visualizations: LUXIGON, Eric de Broche des Combes

The design objectives follow four key principles: enhancing biodiversity through the regeneration of riverine habitats; enriching public life through recreation and environmental learning amid the river’s cooling landscapes; reinforcing cultural identity by celebrating Ingolstadt’s history as a city established along the Danube; and promoting sustainable urban growth by positioning the river as a catalyst for future development.

The project approaches the riverine environments as vital climatic infrastructure for the city, seeking to enhance their ecological and social functions while establishing a distinctive landscape identity. A unifying language of custom-designed landscape furniture draws inspiration from the trunks of large floodplain trees along the riverbanks and is characterized by a golden-yellow color palette. These interventions invite residents to meander, experience climatic comfort, and encounter moments of wonder and awe, fostering a closer relationship with nature and supporting well-being.

An approximately 14-kilometre network of river landscapes, connected by a continuous multimodal pathway known as the Donau-Loop, reconnects currently fragmented natural environments, public spaces, and urban areas. It creates a coherent sequence of places for walking and cycling, resting, and physical activity. This large-scale vision was further developed into a series of smaller, site-specific interventions, including the Donau Terrace, the renaturalization of riverbanks near the dam, and the enhancement of riverside meadows for picnicking and recreation.

Together, these interventions establish the Danube as a new address for Ingolstadt—a collective landscape infrastructure celebrating ecology, climatic comfort, and public life, and bringing nature and everyday urban experiences into closer relationship.

Client and Institutional Partners: Stadt Ingolstadt – Stadtplanungsamt, Stadtentwicklung und Baurecht; Verkehrsmanagement und Geoinformation (VMG); Statistik und Stadtforschung; Umweltamt; Wasserwirtschaftsamt Ingolstadt; Stadtarchiv Ingolstadt; Stadtbücherei Ingolstadt; Europäisches Donau Museum; Bundeswehr Ingolstadt; Bund Naturschutz Ingolstadt.

Team: Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler (partners) Larissa Belcic, Emily Schlickman, Velania Cervino, Pia Faust, Marcus Eichermüller, Marissa Angell, Hope Strode, Gabriella Solange Rodriguez-Berrios, Dima Schledowitz, Lucas Casado

The Contoocook River Park is a 1 ha public landscape combining a 60-space parking area with the ecological regeneration of the riverine edges, embodying the materiality and atmospheres of New Hampshire. Informed by the region's glacial landscapes and their representations in historical postcards—between memory and imagination—the design explores the interplay between granite and waterways, erratic boulders and vegetation, humidity and shadow. It reimagines Peterborough's new public amenity as a living landscape of ecological, cultural, and aesthetic significance at the confluence of the Nubanusit Brook and the Contoocook River- a place deeply connected to the histories of Native American communities and the town of Peterborough.

Ethnobotany informs ecological regeneration through Botanical Bouquets. These are plant assemblages conceived as landscape “gifts” and featured in new postcards shared during an on-site community workshop. Five planting typologies respond to distinct habitats: (I) Woodland Edge and Understory, (II) Riparian Edge – High Ground, (III) Riparian Edge – Low Ground, (IV) Rock Outcroppings and Planted Crevices, and (V) Pioneer Vegetation. Together, they connect woodlands, riverbanks, granite outcrops, and regenerating ground.

The original granite abutments of the former Boston–Maine Railroad bridge over Nubanusit Brook recall the site's industrial heritage. A new pedestrian bridge of post-tensioned granite slabs, developed in collaboration with the German firm Kusser Granitwerke, appears to float above these historic structures, connecting the railway legacy with contemporary stone technology and New Hampshire's longstanding traditions of timber and granite craftsmanship.

Microclimate becomes both a functional and spatial design medium, particularly during winter. Wind simulations test strategies to reduce wind chill and snow accumulation associated with prevailing southwesterly winds. Large boulders along the river terraces and a new edge of evergreen plantings to the south shelter community gathering spaces. In summer, river terraces along the forested edges, overlooks, and seating coves invite visitors to experience the changing atmospheres of water, stone, vegetation, and seasonal light in this memorable riverine landscape.

The Contoocook River Park received 1. Prize in an invited design competition and progressed to the construction documentation phase before being suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Client and Institutional Partners: Town of Peterborough, New Hampshire
MacDowell Colony for the Arts, with Resident Director David Macy

Team: Silvia Benedito (Partner) Larissa Belcic (Project Manager), Ivo Hermann, Ken Chongsuwat, Emily Drury, Ellen Driscoll (Artist)

Technical Support: Ryan Associates, Landscape Architecture and Planning, Somerville, USA
KUSSER GRANITWERKE GMBH, Post- tension granite bridge, Aicha vorm Wald, Germany

How can the living and working practices of being Out-There in the landscape be captured through research and exhibition? With attentive observation and an exploratory mindset, the exhibition design emerged from questions of unfamiliarity, encounter, and entanglement across diverse contexts, as reflected in ten projects developed by landscape architecture institutes/ departments throughout Germany. Conceived as a form of fieldwork, the exhibition itself became an exploratory terrain where processes, experiments, and evidence structured a space of meandering and discovery.

The featured projects were presented as “action-offices” - taxonomic workstations that invited visitors to navigate materials, artefacts, and ideas much like astronauts embarking on missions into unfamiliar territories. The exhibition hall was deliberately darkened, allowing the work to appear as a constellation of illuminated points scattered across an open field. Landscape, after all, encompasses many worlds and hues beyond green.

Within this immersive dimness, moments of heightened attention and learning emerged through ten research projects conducted in places as diverse as Spain, China, Rwanda, and South America, revealing the complex interdependencies that connect cities and their surrounding environments, water cycles, ecological systems, and socio-cultural realities across both local and global scales.

Team: Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler (partners), Larissa Belcic, Lukas Ostermann.
Content and curation partners:

1) Undine Giseke Technische Universität Berlin, with Kathrin Wieck, Lucas Hövelmann, and David Aerni (curatorial team). Projects: Casablanca, Morocco; Kigali, Rwanda

2) Regine Keller and Johann-Christian Hannemann, Chair of Landscape Architecture and Public Space, Technische Universität München (Munich), with Ines Hoffmann, Laura Loewel, Felix Lüdicke, and Florian Rüger (curatorial team). Projects: Cañada Real Galiana, Spain; Onaville, Haiti

3) Jörg Rekittke, National University of Singapore (from July 2016, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) with Philip Paar and Yazid Ninsalam. Projects: Bali and Jakarta, Indonesia

Video in the Exhibition at the Center for Architecture, Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB), Lisbon, October-April 2024

Catalogue by Monade 2023
Editor: Marta Sequeira / essays: João Ferrão, Kath Scanlon, Luís Mendes, Marta Sequeira, Paulo Tormenta Pinto
Conversations: Ana Drago, Cristina de Mendonça, Filipa Roseta, Joana Pestana Lages, José Adrião, Ricardo Bak Gordon
Contributions: Helena Roseta, Inês Lobo, João Gomes da Silva, João Luís Carrilho da Graça, João Seixas, Nuno Valentim, Sandra Marques Pereira, Sílvia Benedito, Telmo Cruz
Frames: Tiago Casanova
Photography: André Cepeda, Beatriz Martins, Daniel Malhão, Nuno Cera, Irene Buarque, Paulo Catrica
Design: Macedo Cannatà
Isbn: 978-989-5370-55-9

A series of site-specific interventions takes advantage of the riverine microclimates, creating shaded, cool, and comfortable spaces for resting, gathering, exercising, and experiencing the river’s unique atmospheres. These interventions combine improvements to pathways, river terraces, overlooks, entry markers, and public amenities with custom-designed landscape furniture, including benches, shading and cooling structures, lighting, water fountains, bicycle racks, and seating areas.

The furniture’s distinctive design language draws inspiration from the trunks of large floodplain trees and river pebbles, recalling the Danube’s historical landscapes of alluvial forests, mature trees, and shifting riverbanks. A recurring golden-yellow color palette, combined with tinted concrete, wood, metal, Jura stone, and gravel, establishes a recognizable identity along the route.

Developed as a flexible catalogue of elements, the furniture and landscape interventions adapt to different sites and uses, combining minimal physical intervention with maximum utility, comfort, and beauty. Together, they transform the pathway into a sequence of inviting public spaces that celebrate the river’s ecological character and microclimatic qualities, bringing residents into closer contact with the Danube and supporting their well-being.

Client and Institutional Partners: Stadt Ingolstadt – Stadtplanungsamt, Stadtentwicklung und Baurecht; Verkehrsmanagement und Geoinformation (VMG); Statistik und Stadtforschung; Umweltamt; Wasserwirtschaftsamt Ingolstadt; Stadtarchiv Ingolstadt; Stadtbücherei Ingolstadt; Europäisches Donau Museum; Bundeswehr Ingolstadt; Bund Naturschutz Ingolstadt.

Team: Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler (partners) Larissa Belcic, Emily Schlickman, Pia Faust, Marcus Eichermüller, Marissa Angell, Hope Strode, Gabriella Solange Rodriguez-Berrios

Photos: Jann Averwerser

The work included the collaboration with a local horticulturalist, expert in tropical plants particular to the climate of Florida (highly damp and hot), and the implementation of a local nursery for overall costs control and maintenance in the future. Both projects provide welcoming hotel entrances, planted edges for privacy between the clients and the public, and vegetated hedges to absorb the white noise from the surrounding highways and roads. Paired with these scopes of work was the development of an efficient drainage scheme to avoid zones of still water as to reduce mosquito breeding sites. Wide canopy trees and bio-swales are included in the parking lots and entry zones not only to create a sense of place but also to provide shelter during the hot summer days.

Team: Silvia Benedito (Partner), Larissa Belcic (Project Manager), Greta Ruedisueli, Samuel Gilbert

OFICINAA was commissioned by the play director and actress Olivia Went to develop the stage concept and the design, building it in cooperation with the technical team at the Theater Ingolstadt. The stage design reflects the passage of time and the rhythm of the seasons, as the mice gather the food in the meadows of spring.

The changing seasons are depicted through four distinct levels at varying heights, connected by a continuous ramp that evokes the stone wall where the mice reside. This design adds depth and volume to the stage, while also creating a narrative space through which the character of Leo Lionni—portrayed by actor Benjamin Dami-Yamamoto—journeys during the transitions of the seasons. The play culminates in winter, at the highest point of the ramp sequence, where Frederick brings to life the vibrant colors of the seasons he have gathered.

The stage and all props have been crafted from woolen felt in various primary colors, evoking simplicity, softness, and warmth—all illuminated by a suspended golden-sun.

Team: Silvia Benedito (Partner), Larissa Belcic (Project Manager), with Marion Eisenmann (Illustration)

Despite the undeniable bond to human’s history, fire has become one of the most politically charged and contested elements. This has been fueled by an ethical awakening in the core of ongoing systemic inequalities linking the history of fire suppression with cultural marginalization and the colonial dispossession of traditional communities—these, practitioners of "Cold-fires” to assist pastoral and silvo-agricultural production, spiritual well-being, cultural practices, biodiversity stewardship, or simply protection against wildfire threats. This presentation illustrates a few examples on how local governments and collective initiatives have established new design reciprocities aiming to re-introducing fire as a catalytic element in ecological stewardship and cultural affirmation.

Program: Lecture in Symposium: Landscape as Architecture, Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio

When does the scope of architecture stop and landscape architecture start (and vice-versa) relative to thermally safe public environments? Disciplinary liability and insurance requirements for design practices often emphasize topics such as safety, quality of life, and the implementation of standards, yet they also raise questions concerning disciplinary boundaries in the context of thermal protection. While landscape architecture seems more concerned with the horizontal domain (the ground) and architecture with the vertical (the wall), interrogating bounded disciplinary scopes is essential for addressing issues of thermal adaptation, climatic justice, and decarbonization.

Benedito’s essay argues for a disciplinary convergence between Architecture and Landscape Architecture in which the wall and the vertical/horizontal sections are discussed as inhabited spaces for thermal protection and architectural innovation.

Editors: Daniel A. Barber, Jeannette Kuo, Ola Uduku, Thomas Auer, Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch

Citation: 
Silvia Benedito, After Comfort: A User’s Guide, “Space of Convergence,” e-flux Architecture and the University of Technology Sydney, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Liverpool, and Transsolar, 2023-2024


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Download the Essay (PDF)

“an ambitious collection of essays that proposes a new framework for understanding landscape design.” 
– Landscape Architecture Magazine

Winner of the Inaugural Book Prize for Architectural Innovation and Sustainability from the Portuguese League of Architects and Ministry of Environment and Climate Action, 2021

“It is rare - and always thrilling - to discover a book that makes us think differently about architecture, by helping us to understand hitherto inscrutable aspects of it.”
 – Alice Rawsthorn

“Through the detailed study of a series of seminal projects Silvia Benedito brilliantly demonstrates that atmospheres can actually be described and interpreted with great precision. In a time of environmental anxiety, her call for a paradigmatic shift centered on the atmospheric opens new and important perspectives for the design disciplines.” - Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University


Photos by Iwan Baan
Date: Dezember 2021

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This siting strategy engages the thick fluvial landscape (extended into the inner courts by the addition of a new substantial tree canopy) and exposes the apartments to the prevailing breezes from the West. This exposure facilitates aeration of the domestic areas and, simultaneously, shelters the inner courts for an increased use of the community during the winter months.

The apartments face East-West and have private gardens to the West. Attached to these gardens, both the kitchen and living rooms extend their areas with the corresponding access to the sunset exposure and the pleasures of living in the outdoors.

Team: Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler (partners), David Birge, Velania Cervino