Aisling O'Carroll appointed Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Geohistorical Practice
By deep reading a site, the Canadian researcher explores the history of landscape architecture to understand its future – for example in the Swiss Haslital Valley. In doing so, she integrates tools from natural sciences and humanities.
Aisling O'Carroll’s work spans multiple disciplines and vast timescales. The Canadian researcher studied and practiced architecture, before shifting her focus to landscape architecture, which she studied at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She practiced for several years in the United States with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, contributing to large-scale urban landscape and ecological restoration projects, including the Port Lands Flood Protection project in Toronto, Canada. Working on such projects, she negotiated the challenges of designing complex urban landscapes — from the range of different stakeholder interests, to addressing changing site conditions over time including industrial contamination, lost ecological function, and increasing flood risk.
In 2016, she co-founded "The Site Magazine", which explores a wide range of topics related to the built environment, from landscape architecture to art, politics, and urbanism. The magazine offers a platform to foster dialogue between practice, academia, and the public. In 2024, it was awarded the Journalism and Media Award from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Both professional practice and publishing have shaped her approach to landscape. “The practice of landscape architecture is one of stewardship and care," O’Carroll explains. "In addressing the challenges that the discipline faces today, a range of temporalities and diverse actors, including the public, must be part of the process.”
“The practice of landscape architecture is one of stewardship and care.”Aisling O'Carroll
Education is an important part of the process, too. O’Carroll has taught seminars and design studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design, University of Toronto, and The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. In her teaching, she challenges students to reflect critically on both site histories and the tools and technologies used today. Students, for example, used digital and physical models to reconstruct historical events from archival photographs, maps, and drawings of Alpine sites. She was Programme Coordinator for Landscape Architecture at The Bartlett from 2020 to 2024, and Programme Co-Director between 2022 and 2023. In July 2025, she has been appointed Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Geohistorical Practice at ETH Zurich.
Study of the Unteraar Glacier in the Swiss Alps
Her approach integrates design with diverse methodologies to address urgent social, ecological, and environmental challenges. In her doctoral research at The Bartlett School of Architecture, she investigated reconstruction as a design-driven method for engaging with history and theory. Among other sites, she studied the Unteraar Glacier in the Swiss Alps, examining its geological history and the scientific exploration that has shaped our understanding of it. She for example looked at how the glacier has been tracked over time, from early efforts to track the movement of individual boulders to comparisons between detailed digital site models generated from aerial photogrammetric surveys today.
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Fieldwork at the Unteraar Glacier. (Photo: Tim Schröder) -
“Our relation to landscape is historically produced.”Aisling O'Carroll
“Our relation to landscape is historically produced.” Through archival research paired with scanning technologies and other analytical methods used in the field, she conducts an in-depth reading of the site and its transformation. “It is important to understand, how a site has been reconceived historically and how these histories shape how we engage with it today." This effort is necessary for thinking through how we can respond to and address environmental pressures faced today. "The landscape in the Haslital Valley is under immense pressure today from climate change and its cascading effects," O'Carroll explains. "By reconstructing the past, we seek to expand the possible futures that can be imagined for it." For example, how Alpine sites adapt to changes in climate in the future.
Her reconstruction process provides valuable insights for restoration and has been featured in several exhibitions and publications. "I see the landscape itself as an archive of the past." Geology and temporality are central to her concerns. In 2024, she was a “Planetary Times” Fellow with the Panel on Planetary Thinking at JLU Giessen, where she traced the history of a pair of nineteenth-century mountain huts in the Swiss Alps, that have long disappeared.
“I see the landscape itself as an archive of the past.”Aisling O'Carroll
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Exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen: The installation presented a 1:10 scale reconstruction of the Hôtel des Neuchâtelois, offering an alternative ‘Temple of Science’ for today. (Photo: Moritz Bernoully) -
Working notes on J. Bourckhardt’s sketch of the Hôtel des Neuchâtelois. (Archival sketch courtesy of Archives de l’État de Neuchâtel)
Her research draws on concepts and practices from a range of fields, including natural sciences, humanities, and landscape architecture. "Geological sciences are evolving today because human activities have become part of the geological record," O'Carroll explains. That geological record holds a history of climate, as well as of power, politics, labour, and even oppression. "With conversations around the Anthropocene and pressing social and environmental challenges, it is important to see the relation between history and the ground." Aisling O'Carroll expands the disciplinary focus to challenge what a practice of landscape architecture is today.