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.

Waiting for Landscape Architecture
December 2024 LECTURE [Upcoming]
Public Lecture Program 
School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University
https://www.architecture.cmu.edu/events/ilmar-hurkxkens-lecture

LA Talks #1
November 2023 TALK
Ilmar Hurkxkens, Janneke van Bergen
Section of Landscape Architecture, TU Delft
https://landscapearchitecturetudelft.nl/la-talks-1-8th-of-november-2023/

Steidl Lecture
September 2023 ENDOWED LECTURE
John Elliot Center for Architecture and Environmental Design, Kent State University
https://www.kentcaedlectureseries.com/fall2023-caedlectures/ilmarhurkxkens

Far from Firm: Soil Driven Design and Construction
March 2023 LECTURE
Master of Landscape Architecture, School of Architecture, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building , University of Sydney UTS


Terrain Moves: Dynamic Design and Robotic Construction in Landscape Architecture
February 2023 LECTURE
ESALA Landscape Seminar Series, Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), The University of Edinburgh
Landscape Seminar Series: Ilmar Hurkxkens | Edinburgh College of Art