SPACE April 2026 (No. 701)
Exhibition views of ‘Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate’
‘Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate’▼1 – an exhibition that repositions Asian landscape practices, long relegated to the margins of modern architectural discourse, within a broader framework of knowledge – is currently on view at Harvard GSD’s Druker Design Gallery. While reintroducing sansu (山水, mountain and water) as part of an Asian conceptual vocabulary, the exhibition resists reducing it to a marker of cultural identity and instead proposes it as a methodology for reading landscape practice in the face of climate change. In conversation with Kim Jungyoon (Associate Professor, Harvard GSD; Co-Founding Principal, PARKKIM Seoul & Boston), the Curator of the exhibition, we discussed its background and curatorial strategy.
Interview Kim Jungyoon Associate Professor, Harvard GSD × Lee Sowoon
Lee Sowoon (Lee): ‘Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate’ was developed on the basis of your research at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), together with the participation of students. The conference held alongside the exhibition also expanded on discussion through collaboration between several institutions at Harvard. Can you explain why a sense of urgency emerged within the GSD concerning Asian landscape architecture at this moment, and how that was concretised in the form of this exhibition and conference?
Kim Jungyoon (Kim): At the Harvard GSD, one or two major exhibitions or conferences are held each year, and in terms of scale this exhibition and conference were quite large, even by that standard. Which professor will curate an exhibition and organise a conference is decided one to two years in advance through a competitive proposal process: faculty members submit formal proposals to the Dean’s Office, and selections are made from among them.
Landscape Architecture is the smallest department at the GSD, so the fact that this exhibition and conference received such significant attention and support internally is noteworthy. There may be many reasons for this, but above all, there was already a shared internal sense that research, teaching, and discussion on Asia had been insufficient. Against that backdrop, the idea of examining the role of landscape architecture in the era of climate change – especially the relatively under‑recognised practices of Asian landscape architecture – through the transnational framework of bioregions was compelling.
For the past three years I have been teaching a seminar on Asian landscape architecture, launched with the full support of our current Department chair, Professor Gary Hilderbrand. The research conducted for that course, along with the students’ investigations, formed a strong foundation for this exhibition and conference. Each week in the seminar, landscape architects and scholars from across Asia delivered guest lectures and engaged in discussion with the students, and all of this work contributed directly to the depth of the exhibition and associated conference.
Lee: In the context of contemporary landscape practice, how can sansu (山水, mountain a...
