The work of Ilmar Hurkxkens is verging between landscape architecture, land surveying and land art. His research focuses on the performance of materials and processes in the landscape using advanced surveying and fabrication methods. He studied architecture at the Delft University of Technology, graduating in 2009 with honorable mention for the design of a linear city and sea dike that combines architecture with flood control. Since 2010 he is teaching at the Chair of Landscape Architecture of Professor Christophe Girot at the ETH Zurich where he is coordinator of the DesignLab and is active in the Landscape Visualization and Modeling Lab. He received the Young Researcher Award at the international conference Thinking the Contemporary Landscape in Herrenhausen, Germany in 2013. In 2015 he founded his own firm Studio Ilmar Hurkxkens which is currently working on landscape architectural projects in Switzerland, Netherlands and Greece. In collaboration with James Melsom he founded LANDSKIP, a laboratory centered on the production and deployment of new technologies to create innovative instruments for landscape transformation. As co-editor of Pamphlet 19, he assesed the importants of field instruments for landscape design. Currently he is working on his doctoral thesis at the Chair of Landscape Architecture at the ETH Zurich that investigates the potential of robotic landscape fabrication following topological methods in landscape architecture as a PhD researcher of the NCCR Digital Fabrication. Recently he won the 2018 Digital Culture Work Contributions award of Migros-Kulturprozent in collaboration with Fabian Bircher as Ungenau Robotics.