Ilmar Hurkxkens is head of the Geographic Design cluster at Boskalis and lecturer at the Section Landscape Architecture, Departement of Urbanism at the Delft University of Technology. His work focuses on the form and processes of natural granular materials using advanced surveying, modelling, and fabrication techniques. After graduating in architecture with an honourable mention from Delft University of Technology, he worked at the Chair of Landscape Architecture of Professor Christophe Girot, ETH Zurich, where he was DesignLab coordinator and member of the Landscape Visualization and Modeling Lab. He received the Young Researcher Award from the Volkswagen Foundation in 2013 and the Digital Culture Work Grant from the Migros Culture Percentage with Ungenau Robotics in 2018. He is co-founder of LANDSKIP, a laboratory centred on the production and deployment of new technologies for landscape transformation. In 2020 he was nominated for the ETH Medal for his dissertation “Robotic Landscapes” at the NCCR Digital Fabrication after which he completed a postdoc at Gramazio Kohler Research. Part of his doctoral research is published in the publication “Robotic Landscapes: Designing the Unfinished” by Park Books in Zurich 2022.
ETH Medal Nomination
September 2020 Nominated for the Silver Medal of the ETH Zurich for outstanding doctoral theses
“Robotic Landscapes: Topological Approaches to Terrain, Design, and Fabrication”