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Land & food·applied

Sustainable Landscapes

Why it matters

The land around a building is usually treated as decoration: a lawn to mow, beds to weed, surfaces to pave. It is paid for in permanent irrigation, maintenance hours, and lost life. A sustainable landscape inverts the deal by copying how wild nature holds ground: resilient local species in mixed communities, minimal human intervention, and rain absorbed where it falls instead of shed into drains. The dividends stack: mowing drops to twice a year, watering fades once plants establish, biodiversity returns within seasons — pollinators, birds, hedgehogs. The ground itself becomes hydrological infrastructure, the "sponge" that keeps streams alive through drought. The founding architect of our Hlibivka concept, Semen Polomanyi, works precisely in this field, and his framing carries the stakes: as climate volatility grows, landscapes designed like ecosystems are becoming a survival condition, not an aesthetic.

Role in 001's holistic picture

The landscape is the tissue everything else sits in: Light Touch to Landscape keeps buildings from wounding it, ponds anchor its water and habitat, the soil is its slowest reservoir, Permaculture supplies its design grammar, and the productive garden is its edible corner. Regenerative Architecture poses one test: "is there more life here than before the building came?" The landscape is where the answer is counted.

In the world

The method borrows from wild ecosystems: mixed plantings of locally adapted, drought-tolerant species over monoculture lawn, minimal intervention as a feature rather than neglect, and water designed to linger — infiltration areas, rain gardens that drink roof overflow, contour features that slow runoff. A mown edge or path is left to signal that the wildness is deliberate. The same logic scales to the size of a city. The Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu built his practice Turenscape on the idea that a city should behave like a sponge: parks, wetlands and permeable ground soaking up stormwater instead of shedding it into pipes. China wrote the idea into national policy in 2014 and launched a sponge-city program that spread across dozens of pilot cities. Our own plot practices the same logic at the scale of a meadow: hydrological infrastructure that drinks the rain where it falls. Planners are now betting whole cities on it.

How 001 engages with it

The Hlibivka design treats landscape as a building system: an even green carpet continuing under the raised modules, wild flowering meadow species sown to make the plot an "ecological bomb" spreading valuable local flora to neighbouring land, and elevated biodiversity explicitly named as habitat for animals. At House 001, the landscape thread runs through the pond research and the plot's balance between living meadow, garden, and human space. The built precedent we measure our own plans against is our archived reference study by studio Zemlia (rain gardens, green terraces, near-zero storm-sewer discharge on an industrial site). And part of the site practices the sense already. The parking and the walkways are made of the same spread crushed stone, calculated to be good enough for wheels and feet. Vegetation keeps pushing through it. One surface serves cars, people, and a share of green at once. Like every permeable surface, it hands the rain to the soil instead of shedding it away. Under the house itself, raised on piles, the landscape simply continues: children and animals pass freely beneath it. The site stays one connected living space rather than a mosaic carved up by building and paving. The plot's one deliberate planting experiment so far is ivy. Set out a couple of years ago, it now spreads vigorously everywhere except the sunniest spots. It is a small lesson in matching species to microclimate.

Maturity: applied. Combined permeable surfaces and unbroken landscape under the house have worked at House 001 for years. The fully designed landscape remains a Hlibivka-concept layer, with the pond and site-balance research ongoing.

Further reading