We root cities back into their natural systems. For generations, they were shaped by the Artificial Intelligence of engineering: pipes, dykes and grids that held nature in check. Natural Intelligence reverses the order. Water, soil and life become the primary infrastructure. The city grows with them, and so does its resilience.
Felixx is a Rotterdam-based Design Lab for Natural Intelligence. International in scope. Systemic in approach. We read how a landscape works: how water moves, what the soil holds, where life settles. On that ground, we design spaces for life to flourish.
Designing for flourishing futures
Felixx carries its ambition in its name. "Felix" is Latin for flourishing, fortunate, thriving – the conditions in which life grows and prospers, and the capacity of soil to generate it. That meaning is deliberate. It is how we approach the climate transition.
We see that transition as a chance to regenerate landscapes, economies and communities. Urgency is real, and it leads to action. Crises carry renewal inside them. So we look for the leverage in a complex challenge: the point where one spatial move shifts the whole system.
Flood risk becomes an opportunity to restore wetlands. Heat stress becomes a catalyst for urban greening. Soil degradation becomes a starting point for regeneration.
For us, optimism is constructive. It means designing the conditions for growth, and turning what constrains a site into what shapes it. Felixx brings that into every project: from strategy to implementation, from vision to built landscape.
"We design space, and we facilitate transformation."
Where research and design reinforce each other
Design at Felixx structures systems. That is why we operate as a Design Lab. We start from data, which makes conditions visible: how water flows, how soil behaves, how climate shifts, how people use a place. Systemic thinking connects what the data shows, across scales, disciplines and timeframes, so that every intervention is judged by what it sets in motion elsewhere. Design emerges at that intersection.
There we organise relationships: between ecology and urbanisation, between long-term resilience and short-term action. Strategies are tested against reality. Projects become prototypes. Implementation feeds back into knowledge. The systems we design keep adapting, performing and evolving.
The metropolitan region as living system
The city is what we work on. Industrialisation and the rise of the car cut its relationship with nature more sharply than anywhere else. The coming decades ask the reverse. Cities are how a growing population can be housed while the pressure on the climate comes down. Our work is to let social and cultural growth go hand in hand with reconnecting the city to its natural systems. Strategy, policy and design meet here, and ecological gain and public support depend on each other. We work at the scale of the metropolitan region, where city and natural landscape interlock: water, biodiversity, food, mobility, energy and social life. None of these stop at an administrative border. Urban resilience therefore takes integrated regional frameworks that reconnect city and landscape. And it takes daily life. Cities are where natural systems gain cultural meaning, and nature endures there once it is embedded in routines and collective imagination. The goal is to rebuild the city on its ecological foundations.
Get in touch
Kratonkade 11, 3024ES Rotterdam
+31 (0)10 273 30 28
General inquiries: felixx@felixx.nl
Business inquiries: bd@felixx.nl
Press inquiries: pr@felixx.nl
A global practice for a shared climate challenge
We are impact-driven. We work where we can make the most difference, and we share what we learn. Every context teaches something different about the climate agenda, so we test our thinking across many of them. We work with local partners, with knowledge institutions, and with an international team in our own office. Some contexts are high-tech, with extensive data inventories to build on. Others are highly dynamic, where experience and craft let us read a situation fast and take the right step while it is still moving. The metropolitan region is our scale in both, because that is where knowledge gathers – and from there it travels. The scale repeats from city to city, and it is where transitions outlast political change: governments shift, cities keep building. Across all of it, we design spatial stories that generate enthusiasm and commitment with everyone involved.
Strong Personas in a Complex Field
Our themes are still being written into political and economic agendas: climate adaptation, nature-based systems, metropolitan restructuring. That takes advocacy, persuasion, and new coalitions. Working with natural systems means working within political systems.
Spatial transformation touches governance, finance, infrastructure, and social structures. Nature-based thinking challenges existing models of land use, investment, and maintenance. It asks different questions about growth, value, and resilience. Those questions are answered in council chambers, in public meetings, and at the table where budgets are set.
That is why Felixx operates with strong figures: visible, outspoken and knowledgeable, able to articulate complex themes clearly and convincingly. We engage in public debate, policy conversations, and interdisciplinary exchange. We collaborate with governments, knowledge institutions, NGOs, developers, and local communities. Ecological principles become policy frameworks, spatial visions, and projects that get built.
We are not neutral observers. We design within systems of power – and help reshape them.
Life at Felixx
Felixx was founded in 2014 by Michiel van Driessche and Deborah Lambert. Today they lead the practice together with associate partners Natalia Andreeva, Eduardo Marin Salinas, Elan Redekop van der Meulen, and John de Groot.
What began as a landscape architecture studio has grown into a Design Lab for Natural Intelligence. Landscape architecture is our foundation. From that core we have built complementary teams: Landscape and Strategy, Landscape and Architecture, Landscape and Urbanism, and Strategic Operations and New Business.
Those teams bring together landscape architects, urban designers, planners, researchers, and strategists. Cities are complex systems, and it takes multiple perspectives to read them. We stay involved from first exploration to implementation – from watershed analysis to realised public space, from strategic vision to constructed landscape.
We are based in Rotterdam, with a second office in Madrid, and we work across Europe and beyond. The landscapes we shape grow more complex in every phase, and that demands technical knowledge. We build it with partners from other disciplines and with knowledge institutions in the regions where we work, exchanging expertise in both directions.
Wherever we work, we are rooting cities back into their natural systems. Research-driven. System-led. Impact-focused.
Team
The people behind Felixx
Landscape architecture is our foundation. From that core, we have formed four complementary teams to serve the full scope of our work: Landscape and Strategy, Landscape and Architecture, Landscape and Urbanism, and Strategic Operations and New Business.
Careers
Join our team
We are a team of landscape architects, urban designers, researchers, and strategists working across Europe and beyond – on projects where spatial change generates lasting ecological and social impact.
We are growing, and we are looking for people who want to grow with us.