PARTICIPATION,INTERPRETATION, AND REPRESENTATION OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN

At the beginning of this interview, Zhang Dong, partner of Z+T Studio, believes that landscapes of each nation should be closely rooted in its own culture and designing landscapes which praise China’s cultural identity should be a part of Chinese designers’ values and beliefs. Beside of integrating with strategies of sustainability and resilience, landscape design should also combine with environmental education. Zhang summarizes a landscape design process into “two objective aspects and one subjective aspect,” and points out that a designer’s professional knowledge, social values, and aesthetic preferences together influence his / her acquisition of information from sites and the design what and how he / she will make. While recognizing the importance of ecology and public participation to landscape design, he stresses that design essentially is to solve problems in a creative way and landscape designers should not neglect the fundamentality of spatial creation and aesthetics to the profession and the discipline. Finally, he explains the Whole- Process Participation design mode adopted by Z+T Studio, and how it helps improve designers’ capacity in observation and representation.