Seeing with a Landscape Designer’s Eye

Kaohsiung is a city known for its industry and its seaport. Through this concrete jungle flows the Love River, winding some three kilometers before it finally reaches the sea, where suddenly the landscape transforms. The crushing concrete is swapped out for seemingly endless new greenery, with mangroves clustered along the riverbank playing host to bugs, fish, shrimps, and crabs as waterfowl gracefully flit and fly around. To find such an oasis in this otherwise highly developed urban area is a surprise and a delight.

This is the work of landscape designer Kuo Chung-twn. With a doctorate in architecture, she has been involved in landscape design for more than 30 years, with a particular attraction to challenging, complex cases. She has worked on many major public projects, and in 2021 she received the National Award for Arts. She has been called a pioneer in Taiwan’s landscape industry, and it is a title well deserved.

Pioneering Taiwanese landscape designer Kuo Chung-twn.

Less is more, old is new

Kuo once said that most of the projects she had worked on were about the “restoration” of wastelands, severely derelict sites, and tumbledown buildings. This was also the case with the Jhongdou Wetlands Park. A century ago, the site was home to numerous ponds and large areas of mangrove forest, but it was gradually filled in due to urban development, becoming a barren wasteland covered in piles of trash. At the invitation of the Kaohsiung City Government, Kuo led her landscape company, Laboratory for Environment & Form (LEF), in a project aiming to restore the original landscape. First they removed the garbage and waste soil, and they enlisted the help of botanist Kuo Chen-meng to search for suitable plant species and rehabilitate the entire coastal forest. Here, nature is center stage, while manmade structures that guide visitors’ activities, such as a simple jetty, a suspension bridge, and public classrooms, play a supporting role.

This illustrates how greatly the focus of landscape design differs from that of architecture. “Architecture emphasizes form, while landscape is more intangible,” explains Kuo Chung-twn. Architecture specializes in creating something where there was nothing, emphasizing the architect’s personal ideas, but the modern concept of landscaping was born out of a desire to repair the environmental harm caused by large-scale construction projects, so beyond the appropriate provision of physical facilities, more emphasis is placed on the overall integration of human activities with the natural environment. Thus we can say that in this age of material abundance and rapid technological advance, landscape design is the reverse of the mindset of mankind enforcing his will on nature, its design philo­sophy instead emphasizing going with the flow of nature, a reflection of contemporary environmental ethics.

Located in downtown Kaohsiung, Jhongdou Wetlands Park is a green oasis in the concrete jungle. (courtesy of LEF)

Landscaping as archaeology

Kuo’s insistence on sticking to her principles meant the case was extraordinarily time-consuming. Before the project started, the team had to conduct intensive cultural and historical research, pore over academic literature and historical texts, and interview local ­seniors, making landscape design seem more like a kind of archae­ology.

Take the public hot spring bathing area in Taipei’s Beitou Park as an example. The site includes a stream that flows from a hot spring in the nearby Thermal Valley, but the natural river channel had long since been narrowed and partly covered over to make space for roads and buildings, leaving only a channel three meters wide. The team compared this to old photos, finding that the stream should not be so narrow. It took a lot of effort to bust apart the concrete ditch and remove the accumulated garbage, and they also had to find Japanese experts in stone gardening to restore the original appearance of the stream, including five small waterfalls. What was once a trash-clogged place that people didn’t want to be around was transformed into a water playground for the public.

In a project at the Hsinchu Moat Park, the team used excavators large and small and manual work to gradually remove the water features that had been modified with cement. Their work was so careful and detailed it was “to the same standard as the restoration of a historical monument,” says Kuo. What pleased her most was that the large pebbles exposed after the concrete was removed were the remnants of old construction work from the Japanese period. Compared to the concrete embankments commonly used today, the old masonry structure preserves the original environment and appearance of the river, an approach that is now recognized as more ecologically sound, and one which Kuo frequently employs.

For the Yoichi Hatta Memorial Park project, Kuo Chung-twn interviewed Hatta’s descendants. After the restoration was done, the family had a reunion in the old house. (courtesy of LEF)

The Mingchi National Forest Recreation Area is one of Kuo Chung-twn’s early projects, notable for how the manmade facilities, such as wooden walkways and observation decks, blend in with their surroundings. (courtesy of LEF)

From domination to co-existence

Monica Kuo, a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at Chinese Culture University, notes that although Taiwan is surrounded by sea, large-scale construction and public works such as river dykes, seawalls, and coastal highways all tend to prioritize safety above any possibility of human interaction with the sea. The only way to truly live up to the spirit of a maritime nation is for people to change their mindset from trying to fight nature to living with it and integrating maritime ecological and cultural aesthetics into public construction work.

This is exactly what characterizes Kuo Chung-twn’s work. In 1986, she returned to Taiwan after studying in Japan and took on a project for the Dongshan River ­Water Park in Yilan County, her first project in Taiwan and the starting point for her career in landscape design. The project made the river a part of everyday local life, setting a new benchmark for public works in Taiwan. Many of today’s most acclaimed landscaping projects, such as the Liuchuan Riverside Walk in Taichung and the uncovering and renovation of Yunlin Creek, can be said to bear her influence to some degree.

It is a wonderful coincidence that most of these projects are intimately tied in with water. In addition to the humid and rainy climate of Taiwan, Kuo postulates, “Maybe it’s that the presence of water is a factor in these places becoming parks.” 

Water doesn’t have to be troublesome or scary; it can also be relatable and approachable, something that Kuo’s designs try to highlight. Crossing a broad grassy slope at Nanliao Fishing Harbor, we come to the “fish scale” staircase embedded in the shoreline; while, as the name implies, it resembles fish scales, these large steps are actually a seawall. However, whereas usually seawalls are imposing concrete walls flanked by massive tetrapod wavebreakers, this one is a beautiful gentle slope surrounded by large stones, creating a scene that blends seamlessly with the adjacent sea. “I had a long discussion with hydraulic engineers from Hsinchu about the slope angle of this embankment,” Kuo recalls. “I kept asking, ‘If we don’t make the slope more gentle, how will people get down?’” Fortunately, by reasoned argument she was able to win the engineers over to her side.

Around Beitou’s Thermal Valley, the river embankment made of large stones and the wooden railings echo the natural colors of the site, embodying a design inspired by nature.

The renovation of the Lon-En Canal Park in Hsinchu City, led by architect Huang Sheng-yuan, is known for its family-friendly design details and fantastical style.

Rediscovering the beauty of Formosa

Landscape design is still a developing field in Taiwan. “Landscaping isn’t just for filling in the gaps in architecture,” architect Wu Shuyuan has frequently said. Boilerplate nurseries, green spaces, and trails are not the full scope of what landscape design can do. Wu, who spent several years in the UK, has devoted himself in recent years to collecting and establishing a landscape vocabulary built around the characteristic wildness of Taiwan’s endemic flora. His highly distinctive approach to aesthetic expression has drawn attention to his projects and triggered a fervent interest in landscape design.

As Kuo Chung-twn has also said, landscape design is not only the work of greening and beautification, but also a profession that brings together architecture, flora and fauna, civil engineering, water conservation, environ­mental engineering, literature, history, and design. It is as hard to define landscaping in a few words as it is to define beauty, yet it has a profound impact on people’s lives.

Nevertheless, when we have the opportunity to take a leisurely stroll along Hsinchu’s ancient moat and ponder the past, or to step onto Mitsui Warehouse Plaza or Brick Yard 33⅓ (the former Yangmingshan US Servicemen’s Club)—both sites designed by Wu Shuyuan—surrounded by vibrant plants that bring a sense of Taiwan’s forests and wild places into the middle of the city, we may find ourselves rediscovering the beauty of Ilha Formosa through the eyes of these landscape designers. 

The creation of the Beitou Hot Spring Museum transformed an abandoned public hot spring bathhouse into an important site for the preservation of local culture and history.

Brick Yard 33⅓, formerly the Yangmingshan US Servicemen’s Club, has a strongly outdoorsy vibe thanks to the use of perennial plants and wild flowers in its outdoor landscaping, a characteristic of Wu Shuyuan’s style.