The Chinese culture has an ancient tradition of attitude towards landscape development. The traditional ‘Chinese garden’ is designed to create a ‘nature like’ experience inside the built environment, and to enable a ‘channel’ between man and nature in one’s everyday life.
China is undergoing a wide-scale modernization and urbanization process these days. The Chinese cities are growing and spreading in a dizzying pace.

In the first phase of the work-shop, we were trying to figure out “What can be learned from China”. We observed some traditionally built gardens and parks, some located inside modern cities, and tried to understand the designing principles and the type of experience they were trying to create. Later, we observed at the modern Chinese city, tried to understand the attitude of the Chinese towards the landscape development in the context of the urban growth processes.
We’ve noticed that there is a certain gap in the cultural and design traditional landscape development, and the modern state of mind, which is mostly influenced by western approaches. We’ve noticed that the landscape development in the Chinese city is working in various scales, from small to extra large, and tried to understand whether there is a constant regularity in the division of built/un-built between the deferent scales. In addition, we explored Chinese contemporary landscape projects and seeked for a modern Chinese approach.

These attempts led us to develop a ‘tool’, incapable of a couple of basic ‘actions’, based on our understandings about the way of action typical to the Chinese in the modern cities:

1. ‘Caged Spaces’ – Built/Un-built. Works in the deferent scales. In smaller scales contributes to the sense of community.
2. ‘Maximum Contact’ – enlarging the area of contact between built/un-built. Referring mostly to the boundaries between the city and the nature outside of it.
3. ‘Fractal Growth’ – a hierarchy of built/un-built spaces, maintaining it’s ratio in deferent scales.
4. Dealing with boundaries – Using elements like roads and rivers for the purpose of defining borders between areas.
5. Preservation of local scenarios – working with local crops as the vegetation of a park.
6. ‘Theme’ and ‘Branding’ – The Chinese tend to ‘brand’ things and have an affection to ‘Theme Projects’ of the kind that is possible to represent by a clear ‘Logo’.

Using these basic categorical actions we intend to make a landscape intervention in the Israeli situation, in the area of Tel-Aviv Hertzelya.

Team: Yaniv Lenman, Ofer Bilik, Roy Carpman

Related Links:
http://www.unep.org/sport_env/Activities/beijingConf07/media/ Unep – The Beijing Report 2007
http://whc.unesco.org/ UNESCO World Heritage Site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_garden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Sun
http://www.newsgd.com/

Group Presentation: