Bas Smets on Designing Augmented Landscapes

Arles Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France, 2009-2021. The former railway yard is now planted with more than 80,000 trees, shrubs, and plants. Courtesy Michiel De Cleene.

The landscape architect discusses his design for Notre-Dame, this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, and what he means by biospheric urbanism.

Bas Smets is a Belgian civil engineer, architect, and landscape architect, a background that has influenced his approach to designing urban environments that are resilient to climate change. In 2007, he founded Bureau Bas Smets in Brussels, which now consists of a team of 20 architects, landscape architects, and civil engineers.

In 2022, Bas Smets gained considerable notoriety by winning an international competition to design the public space surrounding Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. The firm has completed over 50 projects across 15 countries, including Albania and Bahrain. In 2023, he was appointed as a professor in practice at the Harvard GSD.

Bas Smets’ engineered ecosystems utilize natural processes to cool the air, capture water for evapotranspiration through vegetation, and employ the shade of trees and plants to moderate ambient temperatures. This September, METROPOLIS visited Smets in Belgium and spoke with the designer about biospheric urbanism, augmented landscapes, and his work on the 2025 Venice Biennale’s Belgium Pavilion.

You see yourself as an architect of the landscape versus a “paysagiste,” or “landscaper” as the landscape architect is called in French. Why do you make that distinction and what do you mean by biospheric urbanism, a concept central to your practice?

A landscaper sounds like a decorator, the person that we asked to put some nice plants in the back of the garden. What we do is much more profound because we make spaces with the elements that define the outdoor climate, the physical reality. 

Biospheric urbanism is rethinking the urban space, where most cities have become impermeable, as the interface between meteorology—an uncertain variable which we cannot control—and geology, much less known. We have cut that connection and we must reestablish it. The best symbol for that connection is a tree that at once goes into the unknown geology and reaches out to the meteorology.

Your work is based on your reflections on the relationship between nature and urban spaces, which led you to be interested in the logic of nature and natural intelligence. Could you elaborate?

I have read Vladimir Vernadsky, and I met Bruno Latour when he was still alive. I am acquainted with his collaborator Frédérique Aït-Touati, and with Emanuele Coccia. This whole philosophical background of life on this planet and the biosphere has been central to my thinking. I am fascinated by the possibilities of life.

It is recently that we started to understand plant intelligence better. For the past decade, I have been having discussions with Stefano Mancuso, the plant neurobiologist from Florence. I am attempting to envision a different type of landscape, one that incorporates the discoveries related to plant intelligence.

In landscape design, we are still stuck in 19th century ideas and typologies that we use over and over again. With a better understanding of what plants need to survive, we can come up with a different kind of landscape practice that considers their intelligence and capacities. In that sense, we try to read the city as an artificial environment made by and for humans, where we can find a natural environment comparable to the artificial one and bring that natural logic into it. That way, the city becomes a possibility for nature. That is a whole new way of looking at the city.

Paris Les Abords de Notre-Dame, 2022-2028. Rendering courtesy Studio Alma for Team Bureau Bas Smets.

You refer to your created environments as “augmented landscapes.” Could you elaborate on that denomination? Would you use the Notre Dame public space project under construction as an example?

Darwin used to say, it’s not the environment that shapes the plants, it’s the plants that shape the environment. In every project, not only the aesthetics count, but also the performance of the ecosystem, or the ecosystemic values or services they give. An augmented landscape is designed considering rainwater, humidity, wind, evapotranspiration, shade, and the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI.) We see the landscape as a way to regulate the environment, and as a means to produce microclimates.

That is exactly what we are doing around Notre Dame by doubling the number of trees, channeling the refreshing winds in summer, blocking the cold winds during wintertime, thinking about shade, and inviting visitors to make a tour of Notre Dame. The whole public space has been rethought through the lens of both climate and human outdoor comfort.

The most difficult part was the frontal plaza of Notre Dame, which needs to be kept open, because underneath lies the Roman archeological site impeding the planting of trees on top. Additionally, the view is protected and preserved. We proposed to have a five-millimeter thin layer of water that will run down on the hottest days, and that will create cooling by the evaporation of the water film. The water source is rainwater stored in the underground parking during wintertime and reused during the summer.

Building Biospheres by Bureau Bas Smets with Stefano Mancuso, Flanders Architecture Institute 2025,
Courtesy Michiel De Cleene

Natural intelligence is the central theme of the exhibition Building Biospheres curated by you and Stefano Mancuso, at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Could you explain further the intriguing relationship you see between the intelligence of plants and AI to achieve more livable urban spaces?

When humans built the first primitive huts, as [Marc-Antoine] Laugier* described them, we used elements from the biosphere. However, today we spend 80 percent of our time indoors, cut off from the biosphere that sustains life. We have been making microclimates in which we live disconnected from the real climate. I think of buildings as climates because we are constantly heating, ventilating, and cooling them.

For the Biennale, we installed 400 trees, plants, and shrubs from the subtropical forest in the Belgian Pavillion to create a cooling microclimate. We featured species from both sides of the equator, and we have been following their growth. We want to understand plant intelligence by monitoring how they react to variable situations. Before transporting the plants to Venice, they were in Ghent for six months for research at the University of Ghent. By the end of November 2025, we will have completed a total of 12 months of data collection, with six months in Ghent during the winter and six months in Venice during the summer. All this data is processed in real-time using artificial intelligence, in order for plants to activate irrigation, lighting, and ventilation. We want to understand how plants can create the best environment for themselves. If they grow, they generate photosynthesis and create transpiration, and the more they grow, the more they lower the temperature.

We are rethinking the relationship between nature and architecture. Instead of designing architecture exclusively for humankind and pushing all other forms of life outside, we can start reimagining architecture as a possibility to secure human, plant, and animal life. This is particularly important in the context of our warming planet.

This interview was published in METROPOLIS Magazine on October 22, 2025. https://metropolismag.com/viewpoints/bas-smets-on-designing-augmented-landscapes/