Dieter Kienast (1945–1998) is a key Swiss figure in European landscape architec­ture. Amidst a striking change in societal understandings of nature, he sought a syn­thesis between design and ecology. He designed spaces to make the dissolving opposition between city and countryside legible and to enable aesthetic experience to help cope with increasingly complex everyday life. Kienast introduced new challenges into the discussion of those fields. Critique of urban planning, processes of participation and the significance of urban vegetation played just as much a role in these discussions as did art, literature, architecture, and the popularity of postmod­ernism.