ECLAS is honoured to confer the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award to professor Frieder Luz from Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University in Germany. The aim of the ECLAS Lifetime Achievement Award is to acknowledge accomplishments over a lifetime or long career in teaching, scholarship, creative activity and service. The accomplishments must reflect sustained activity over an extended period of time that is truly inspiring for the wider academic community nationally or internationally. ECLAS recognizes his continuous and outstanding engagement for the internationalisation of landscape architecture education, which had and is still creating impact far beyond his own institution. The second award of this type in 2020 was conferred to professor Maria Auböck.
Besides his regular and excellent teaching to undergraduate and international master students, Frieder Luz devoted himself with enduring energy and stamina to offer a variety of study experiences abroad, realising more than 500 student mobilities from and to Freising. For 26 years, he has been an always welcome ambassador in many European landscape architecture schools.
Short biographical sketch
Professor Frieder Luz, born 1955, studied landscape architecture at the Technical University in Weihenstephan, Bavaria, from 1977 to 1980, and worked in private practice until 1984. He was a Fulbright scholar and M.Sc. from the University of California, Davis, Department of Applied Behavioural Sciences, where he worked with Marc Francis on the social and behavioural aspects of landscape architecture. He then became assistant professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart, Institute for Landscape Planning and Ecology, where he completed his PhD on the public acceptance of landscape planning projects.
Since 1994, he has been professor of landscape architecture at the University of Applied Sciences in Weihenstephan, with a teaching focus on landscape planning and bioengineering. His research has focused on the implementation of landscape planning in Bavaria and participatory landscape planning integrating multiple users, stakeholders, ecology and the natural environment. He has also run various experimental construction workshops in the context of small stream restoration and is a recognized specialist in planted and seeded vegetation techniques. His additional focus is on landscape aesthetics and visual resource management.
As a foreign relations coordinator, has established numerous international cooperation among universities. After early retirement in October 2019 he was appointed visiting professor in 2020 at the University College Dublin, department of Landscape Architecture.
