Instructors
Chang Huai Yan, Landscape Architect and Founder of Salad Dressing Landscape Architects
Program: Tropical Landscape
Site: Varied
Scale: Varied
Brief
“Do we choose to be parasites on Earth’s resources? Or do we choose to be good gardeners?” (Gilles Clément)
The urban landscape and natural landscape in the past, have been viewed as places of polarity.
Today with the increase in the ecological awareness, the city which contains the highest percentage of educated population, has taken a switch in its position as antithesis of nature.
Co-existence of nature and human is a possible way of reversing the destruction of the age of Anthropocene.
Sustainable design is a design that supports the ecosystem and biodiversity, not focused on human benefit and mankind’s necessities. From this point of view the program looks at the possibility of exploring the urban landscape as part of our interaction with nature.
Through the application of today’s knowledge and science in botany, zoology and ecology, we can envision buildings that are part living and part machine, similar to a cyborg. A new domesticated realm as a new ecosystem, deals not only with the present condition, but as well as allowing for future evolution, for both landscape as well as living creatures within.
“The only constant in nature, is change” (Charles Darwin) and this program wants to expand this theory into the study of evolution in domesticated ecosystem.
