Barbara Prezelj
Job title:
Lecturer in Landscape Architecture
Office:
R.03c, Hunter Building
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Barbara Prezelj is a researcher and designer, trained in landscape architecture. Her work spans areas of landscape aesthetics, theories of embodiment, affect and emotion, and cultural geography. She approaches sensibility and the intensities of experience as primary means through which we relate to and come to know the world. In her research and practice-based work, she is particularly interested in the relations between mind, body and climate; landscape and subjectivity; thought and feeling; urgencies and events; pasts and futures; movement and stasis. She tends to approach these interests from the margins: edgelands, shorelines, rural, undervalued, overlooked and exhausted lands.
Barbara's current work examines landscape architecture’s engagement with environmental urgency as affective/bodily valuation. The research attends to the aesthetic, political and experiential dimensions of landscape, and to the ways collective sensibilities participate in the remaking of life and the shaping public opinion. It follows that much of Barbara’s work aims to affirm the role of the body in the context of climate adaptation/climate change, which directly influences what and how she teaches.
Barbara works at the intersection of research, teaching, writing and practice. She is a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture and a PhD candidate at ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art. She holds a MSc from TU Delft, the Netherlands and a BSc from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, both in Landscape Architecture. Prior to her work at ECA, she has taught theory seminars at TU Delft and practiced with design firms in London (VOGT) and Amsterdam (Rijnboutt).
Research interests
- Landscape aesthetics
- Theories of embodiment, affect and emotion
- Non-representational theory
- Cultural geography
- Relational design
- Marginal landscapes
Barbara teaches and acts as Course Organiser on a variety of theory, design and material knowledge courses across MA and MLA Landscape Architecture programmes at ESALA.
Academic year 2026/27:
- Situating Landscape Architectural Theory (ARCH11272)
- Design: Site & Process (ARCH08063)
- Material Practices (ARCH08062)
Barbara's teaching is grounded in intellectual curiosity and creative rigour. She believes in the necessity of transdisciplinary thinking and works to equip students with tools that enable them to work through complex ideas and construct new worlds, as designers and as thinkers.
Barbara is currently not accepting PhD students.
Research
Research
Research activities
Urgency Felt: Landscape Practices of the Event
Barbara's ongoing PhD project reconceptualizes (environmental) urgency as primarily felt affect and not abstract measure, and thus as thoroughly political, profoundly social and as something that does public work. The project argues that urgency is, at its core, affective and that the modulation of (environmental) urgency is an aesthetic skill integral to contemporary landscape practice. She is interested in the capacity of landscape practice to intentionally cultivate and hone its aesthetics sensibility, with affective relations seen as socially and politically important design considerations alongside, not instead of, rational deliberation and ecological thought.
By theorizing urgency as a specific 'mode of eventfulness', and examining it in relation to Humphry Repton's Red Books, Geoffrey Dutton's poetry and garden, the National Trust's 1965 Enterprise Neptune campaign, and UK's present-day coastal adaptation efforts, the project seeks to develop a framework for deliberately and responsibly adopting urgency (and the realm of experience more broadly) as an object of design.
Most recently, Barbara has been thinking about Norfolk's eroding coastline, the land left behind and coastal retreat as a form of detachment.
I Call It a ‘Garden’, a Place of Seeds: Geoffrey Dutton’s Lessons in Curiosity and Exploration
Geoffrey Dutton (1924–2010) was a distinguished biomolecular scientist who was also a poet, mountaineer, wild water swimmer, and the creator, caretaker and chronicler of a Highland garden in Perthshire, Scotland. Dutton saw no conflict between science and poetry, and eight acres of a steep and rugged hillside provided him with an experimental ground to explore this and other complex interrelationships in his search for the new. For fifty years, Dutton maintained what he called a ‘marginal garden’ – a marginal site guided with marginal effort to maximum marginal effect. His lifelong ecological dialogue with the garden was ahead of its time and is today largely forgotten, despite Dutton’s multiple publications in both prose and verse. As the garden slowly transitions back into the wild margin, this ongoing project aims to investigate its land-based lessons and reposition Dutton as a significant figure in contemporary garden and landscape discourse and practice.
Selected publications
Prezelj, Barbara. “A Hand That Gardens.” In I Call It a ‘Garden’, a Place of Seeds: Geoffrey Dutton’s Lessons in Curiosity and Exploration, edited by Barbara Prezelj, 37-42. Edinburgh Diamond, 2025.
Prezelj, Barbara, and Gregory Seigworth. “The Elbow Room of the Universe: Technicity, Diegesis, Force.” In The Space of Technicity: Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements, edited by Robert A. Gorny, Stavros Kousoulas, Dulmini Perera and Andrej Radman. Delft: TU Delft OPEN Publishing & Jap Sam Books, 2024.
Prezelj, Barbara. “Practicing Amid/Upon/With Urgency.” In (BUILDING) NEW PERSPECTIVES through Practice-Led Research in Art, Design and Architecture. Conference proceedings. Riga: Art Academy of Latvia, 2023.
Prezelj, Barbara. “The Allure of the Flap.” Thresholds 50 (2022): 321–30.
