Peter Latz (born 1939) is a German landscape architect and a professor for landscape architecture at the Technical University of Munich. He is best known for his emphasis on reclamation and conversion of former industrialized landscapes. Retired today, he is an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and is also a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Latz once noted in a foreword for the book Visionary Gardens by Ernst Cramer that the overall of landscape architecture could be applied in abstract rules. "The beauty of nature lies within the essence and effect of plants and materials."
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Peter Latz was born in Darmstadt and grew up in the Saarland as the son of Heinrich Latz, a German architect. After graduating from high-school he studied landscape architecture at the Technische Schule in Munich, and after taking his diploma in 1964, he joined the four year post graduate education in town planning at the Institute of Urban Development and Regional Planning at the RWTH Aachen. Peter Latz and his wife, Anneliese, founded their landscape architecture office in Aachen and in 1968 in Saarbrücken under the name Latz + Partner. Another urban planning, system planning and landscape planning was set up in 1970 and directed until 1976. Latz continue to practice landscape architecture and town planning since then, working with groups of architects, sociologists, and economists. Peter Latz started teaching in 1968 as a lecturer at the Limburgse Akademie voor Bouwkunst in Maastricht. He became a full time professor for landscape architecture at the Gesamthochschule Kassel in 1973 and was appointed as a professor at the Landscape Architecture and Landscape Planning Department at the Technical University of Munich in 1983 where he retired in 2008.
Among his best known projects is the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in the Ruhr Area in Germany.[1] The site of 230 hectares was formerly a very large steel mill. When it became derelict, Latz+Partners, the firm was commissioned to design the park after winning an international design competition with the master plan for the whole site in 1991. They decided to keep the main structures and to incorporate them into a postmodern landscape design. A series of gardens were planted within and around the ruins with the use of the traditional horticulture. Clipped hedges, knot gardens, parterres, bosks, and rose gardens had created juxtaposition between this formal garden that is situated within a post-industrial site. Duisburg-Nord was a successful landscape garden because Latz had altered the relationship that humans had with the existing site. Because of this project Peter Latz, besides the American landscape architect Richard Haag, is considered to be one of the international pioneers for the reclamation and conversion of former industrialized landscapes.
The philosophy of his Latz+Partners firm focuses not only on quality but also on the technical competence and the know-how. Since the 1980s, the firm begins to gear towards the metamorphosis of postindustrial sites.