Landscape Intricacy or Landscape Minimalism?
8/31/2025
My design journey has shifted from heavy-handed urban park projects toward a humble, handmade landscape tool. As a landscape architect working in urban contexts, I am always seeking new possibilities for better design solutions.
I am navigating between two opposing paths. On one side, with deep respect for nature, I constantly ask: What should our homeland be? I believe design should reconnect people with nature, guiding them to praise wildness and engage more deeply with the natural world. On the other side, I strive to deliver intricate and expressive landscapes, carefully crafted to meet the complex needs of urban living. In my earlier work, I designed community parks and public spaces as functional parts of the city—pursuing high-quality infrastructure and elegant spatial experiences that were site-sensitive and culturally responsive. Yet I often felt guilty that these projects were not ecologically grounded.
At RISD, under the guidance of mentors and professionals, I came to understand ecology more deeply. I realized that nature itself is powerful—it can restore and recover on its own. Nature is beautiful; it is our true homeland. Sometimes, the best design is simply to let nature be. From this belief, a new journey began with a humble landscape tool I created: Beauty Captures Machine. This handmade piece carries a modest attitude toward nature, inviting people to see its beauty without intervention. It gently guides us back to the life we are meant to have—one rooted in closeness to the natural world. This work embraces minimalism, in contrast to my earlier approaches, yet it opened a new path for me. Even a humble tool can hold profound value, reconnecting people with nature and reminding us: Look—nature is beautiful.
Water has become a key to my practice. In downtown Providence, I created Water Garden, an “urban living room” shaped by ecological design principles. By cutting patterned openings in asphalt that transformed into biowales and rain gardens, I created a system that filters water, nourishes plants, mitigates the urban heat island effect, and restores comfort in a nature-oriented public space. I also learned that nature follows its own logic—plants shift horizontally and vertically as topography changes, forming gradients of species and habitats. Inspired by this, I designed Sky Walk in downtown Jersey City—a linear space that carries natural experiences along a descent from high to low, restoring ecological conditions within the city while offering people a place to connect with real nature.
Recently, to deepen my approach, I sought a more scientific understanding of natural systems. I spent a year purely observing the woods, studying ecological patterns to uncover the rules that shape them. From this work, I developed my thesis project, Tree Story, which applies scientifically grounded principles to simulate natural patterns and predict plant growth. By examining the geometries of trees, their load distribution, and structural logic, I began to explore how such natural intelligence, it might inspire larger ecological applications—an inquiry I continue to pursue.
Through these explorations, I have stepped away from over-design and toward an approach rooted in ecology. I am rethinking what sustainability truly means—how to respect ecological systems, embed design more deeply in site context, and create spaces that genuinely connect people with nature. The question continues to guide me:
What should the human living environment be?