Pasongjit Kaewdang (PK) is the founder and managing director of Redland-scape.Ltd who has international working experience for more than 28 years in Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand. He gathered valued experiences to establish his company “Redland-scape”.
Redland-scape is a professional landscape architecture design firm based in Bangkok for over 19 years since 2003 it specializes in landscape and urban development, envisions future possibilities and creates landscape value for the places.
WLA: Why did you become a landscape architect?
PK: Landscape architecture combines many different fields, such as ecology, urbanism, and architecture. Landscape architects have big challenges in working with a living system that is in constant exchange with its surroundings making the area landscape architects affect bigger scale than the pure design of architecture.
Landscape Architecture is a challenging profession. It’s not just for aesthetic reasons but also to improve people living quality from a micro to macro scale.
WLA: How do you think the landscape architecture profession can grow?
PK: In general, the landscape architecture profession has a wide range of specifications regarding the knowledge of plants, technical skills, and design. The landscape architecture profession can grow by collaborating with architects and other professionals. To get more interest from younger people, it could be also helpful to invest in education. When there will be new laws to improve safety by preventing flooding, it would also point out the importance of landscape architecture in collaboration with city planners.
WLA: How can landscape architects better connect people with nature?
PK: A good way to connect people with nature is by making it accessible. In big cities, people often look for places to hide from all the traffic and noise around them and go to parks or greeneries. Helping people to connect with nature, in my understanding, would be to give them places like parks or green areas at their homes to relax.
WLA: How can the landscape architecture profession improve?
PK: The landscape architecture profession can improve by working together with other professions. It is also important to be sustainable and try to save resources as much as possible by considering how conditions may change in the future and what trees and materials can sustain for a long time.
WLA: What is the future of landscape architecture?
PK: In times of climate change, people get more concerned about improving environmental conditions. There will be a higher demand for solutions for city concepts, including concepts that focus on natural disasters such as flooding. To solve those problems, different professions, including landscape architects, have to work together. Furthermore problems like the heat island effect, it is needed to have landscape architects create concepts that help the city to cool. In conclusion, there will be many demands for landscape architects in the future.
Thank you to Pasongjit Kaewdang for taking the time to answer our questions about landscape architecture and the future.