POLA

In their exhibition, POLA Landscape Architects explore fundamental questions of their work: What shapes our actions? Is it origin, memory, habit – or a quiet longing to leave a trace? After all, every designed landscape, every urban open space, is also a kind of resonance chamber for their thinking and a mirror of inner images. POLA themselves describe it like this: “Our work is an open stage for our coexistence. Behind this stage stand people who design open spaces, consciously or unconsciously charging them with personal memories, attitudes, and highly individual ideas. Therefore, what we do on the outside is a reflection of what lives on the inside.”

For this reason, the exhibition makes visible the personalities behind the designs – their joy in experimentation, their ability to distill dreams and longings into space, and to transform them into poetry. However, the focus is not on specific projects, but on ways of thinking. Nearly 300 personal artifacts from everyday office life and the environment of the team offer intimate insights into inner landscapes that influence the poetic design language of the landscape architecture office.

The diversity of the artifacts, as well as their collage-like arrangement without systematization or categorization, allows for a wide range of associations. In this way, the exhibition illustrates the studio's approach in a way that is both abstract and very concrete. Visitors can find answers to questions that concern them personally: What stories shape our thinking, actions, and design? What influences our creativity, our decisions, our lives? In this sense, the exhibition is also a plea for individuality, sensuality, and keeping open spaces in a world primarily focused on rationality and optimization.

POLA Landscape Architects was founded in 2009 by Jörg Michel in Berlin. Among their most well-known projects are the extension of Hamburg’s park "Planten un Blomen" (2022) and the Lamme Garden in Bad Salzdetfurth (2021). The studio is currently working on projects in Innsbruck, Hamburg, Ingolstadt, Rüdesheim, Potsdam, Berlin, California, Duisburg, Mannheim, and Erfurt. In 2025, three of their projects were part of the German Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Opening: 30.10.2025, 7 p.m.
Welcome: Ulrich Müller (Architektur Galerie Berlin)
Introduction: Andreas Machemehl (Cultural anthropologist)

Gallery talk: 4.12.2025, 7 p.m.
Participants: Ulrike Dix (AFF Architekten), Jörg Michel (POLA), Anna Viader (TU Dresden)
Moderation: Annabelle von Reutern