New professor for Architectural Design as of 1.10.: Thilo Folkerts

Thilo Folkerts was born in Neuenhaus, Germany, in 1967. He studied landscape architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. 
He taught from 1999-2002 as a research assistant at the Chair of Landscape Architecture at the ETH in Zurich and in 2006 as a visiting professor at the École d'architecture de paysage at the Université de Montréal, Canada. Teaching assignments in landscape architecture, design and urban planning at the TU Berlin in 2008 and at the Academy of the Arts in Stuttgart from 2011-14, as well as at FH Erfurt, Berlin International University of Applied Sciences, DIA Dessau International Architecture Graduate School, Berlin University of Applied Sciences. 

Thilo Folkerts was a fellow of the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome in 2014. Since 2020, he has been a member of the scientific comittee of the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche in Treviso, dedicated to promoting garden and landscape culture internationally. Within the Program for Design-Based Doctorate (PEP) at TU Berlin, Thilo Folkerts worked intensively on the explication of his own design process in 2017-2021, as well as on design as knowledge production in general.

In his work, Thilo Folkerts pursues an idea of landscape architecture that is dedicated to the communicative and sensual experience of space. Such legibility and tangibility within a wide range of scales—from urban planning to experimental intervention in urban space; and from landscape gardens to conceptual miniature gardens—is both objective and tool of the work. Garden as 'Arbeitsbegriff', as a cultural concept, for actively relating to what exists plays an essential role here.

In addition to extensive experience in conventional planning processes, Thilo Folkerts and his Berlin office 100Landschaftsarchitektur, founded in 2006, have realised experimental installation projects on the concept of the garden - mostly in public, urban spaces. These projects serve to formulate and sharpen fundamental design concepts; they also underline an interest in placing such essential landscape themes in a wider discourse. Accordingly, Thilo Folkerts also works as an author, editor and translator on the concept and communication of landscape architecture as a legible design discipline. Thilo Folkerts is specifically interested in working in the border areas and areas of cooperation between landscape architecture and its neighbouring disciplines - in particular architecture, urban planning and the visual arts, where transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity increasingly form an indispensable part of the practice of urban space making.

The work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna will be dedicated to the development of independent design approaches to landscape, garden and open space in the context of landscape architectural, architectural and urbanistic design.