Georges Descombes (Geneva, Switzerland, 1939) is an architect and landscape architect. He graduated from the École d’Architecture de Genève in 1969 and continued his studies at the Architectural Association in London, where he received his diploma in 1973. After an early professional period connected to figures such as Pier Luigi Nervi and Marc-Joseph Saugey, he returned to Geneva, where he began an extensive professional, academic and research career.
His work operates between architecture, landscape and territorial transformation, with particular attention to existing traces, memory and the processes of change that shape each place. Rather than treating landscape as a finished image, Descombes works with existing conditions, understanding territory as a superimposition of layers and design as a tool capable of revealing latent relationships, traces and processes.
Among his most significant works are Parc de Lancy in Geneva, the Geneva section of the Voie Suisse on Lake Uri, the Bijlmer Memorial in Amsterdam, Parc de la Cour du Maroc in Paris, and a number of urban interventions in cities including Lyon, Brussels and Antwerp. One of his best-known projects is the renaturalisation of the Aire River in the canton of Geneva, developed with the Superpositions team. The project works with the former canalised riverbed by introducing a new geometric structure within which the river progressively reshapes its own course, becoming a reference in contemporary landscape architecture.
Alongside his professional practice, Descombes has developed an extensive teaching career in Europe and the United States, with appointments and courses at institutions including the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2021, he received the Grand Prix suisse d’art / Prix Meret Oppenheim, one of the principal cultural distinctions awarded by the Swiss Confederation.
