WLA recently interviewed Hu Sun 孙虎 via email about his journey as a landscape architect. The Founder, Chairman, Chief Designer of Guangzhou S.P.I Design Co., Ltd graduated from Nanjing Forestry University, he has more than 20 years of experience in landscape architecture design. He has presided over nearly 100 international and domestic landscape planning and landscape design projects and has won many international and domestic awards.
Why did you become a landscape architect?
When I was young, I enjoy painting. I often painted in class, in the mountains, and often on the street. Then, I realized to be a landscape architect is kind of cool. Walking around in nature, and making the landscape design come alive on paper with a pen. If it’s fortunate enough, the paper designs could be transformed into real landscapes.
Later, I travelled through the landscape and met people in their daily life. I could feel their joys and sorrows after immersing in the scenery. It turns out that landscape design is not only about painting, literature, and construction, but also a kind of reference to people’s minds.
Through life has unavoidable trials and tribulations, the landscape can settle people’s hearts by creating a comforting zone and this has become my goal as a landscape architect.
Over these years, I keep working in the industry, I have been defeated, but the thought is still tempting to continue as a landscape architect. I just have a love for the landscape in my heart, and I stick to this ideal and don’t want to relax.
What is your approach to landscape design?
New Shanshui Design Concept is the natural spirit and cultural value rooted in landscapes. It takes the emotional exchange between humans and nature as a medium and reshapes the aesthetics of contemporary urban life artistically through the current material civilization such as new technology, new craftsmanship and new materials to build a living community in a balanced way and leave a poetic space for life evolution.
Meanwhile, the “New” refers to time, starting from the reality and civilization at this time. The “Shanshui” refers to space, microscopic site spirit, and an extended regionalist attitude. In this way, the landscape constructs a poetic life suitable for the present and the region for human beings.
The “New Shanshui” is to explore the history and the present, mapping out a route for humans to return to nature. On the microscopic scale, it is a poetic habitation of living space with ecological nature, allowing landscapes to be introduced into urban patch space. On the mesoscale, it is to solve the problems of homogenization and urban diseases in the process of urbanization, so that the city can be integrated into the landscape. On the macro-scale, the New Shanshui Design Concept is trying to solve the ecological security of the land and the problem of the construction method of ecological civilization to make the landscape become the infrastructure of the country.
Q3. How do you see the future of landscape architecture?
Landscape architecture is a promising industry. The world is so rough, and we are facing problems like climate crisis, urban disease and isolated society. However, as long as people are full of yearning and desire for a better life, as long as landscape architects can output proposals for a better lifestyle, as long as we insist on walking on this road, landscape architecture will have a bright future, and full of passion and positive energy.
WLA would like to thank Hu Sun 孙虎 for taking the time to answer our questions and give some insights on his landscape architecture career and approach.
