“Design With Nature Now” Inspires Exhibits in Taipei and Nanjing  

Two new translations of the Lincoln Institute book Design with Nature Now are hitting international bookshelves this year, and with them, a pair of interactive exhibitions—one in Nanjing, China, and a second in Taipei, Taiwan—have brought the publication’s concepts and projects to life for thousands of attendees.

Design with Nature Now was published in 2019 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Pennsylvania, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ian L. McHarg’s landmark volume, Design with Nature. Published in 1969, that book helped redefine landscape architecture and introduced ecological planning principles aligned with the growing environmental movement. Edited by Penn faculty, Design with Nature Now reflects on McHarg’s enduring influence over half a century later and showcases a variety of visionary environmental design projects taking place around the world. They include a protected 2,000-mile Yellowstone to Yukon wildlife corridor, a 5,000-mile Great Green Wall of trees and shrubs being planted to combat desertification in Africa, and the transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a 2,200-acre urban park and wetland habitat in New York City.

Recognizing that it would be easier for people to appreciate the enormity and scale of such massive projects when the accompanying photographs and maps were measured in feet as opposed to inches, a team at Penn—including coeditor Frederick “Fritz” Steiner, professor and dean of the Weitzman School of Design, and William Whitaker, architectural archives collections manager—curated a series of visually stunning exhibitions at the Weitzman School upon the book’s initial publication in 2019. With the work now being translated into both simplified and traditional Chinese (the former used predominantly in mainland China, the latter in Taiwan), Steiner found partners with Penn connections abroad who were eager to revive and reimagine those installations for new audiences.

The Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects (TILA) agreed to host an exhibition in Taipei, where the mayor is a Penn Law School alumnus; Southeast University in Nanjing, China, offered to host as well. Southeast is “the oldest school of architecture in China, and it was founded by two Penn alums, so we have a very close relationship,” Steiner says.

The Nanjing exhibition opened first, running May 31 through July 31, while the Taipei installation was open from September 14 to October 12. The exhibitions drew “thousands and thousands of people,” says Steiner, who attended both openings.

“Both venues were amazing,”  Steiner says, and the settings enhanced the displays of maps and other materials related to the book: “The Nanjing exhibition was held in a kind of shopping plaza on a huge lake by the historic city wall—it’s a major subway stop and a park, a venue where a lot of people get married, so it was just swarming with people,” Steiner says. The Taipei exhibit was housed in a former tobacco factory “in the hippest cultural and arts center of the city,” he adds, at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park.

Penn professor and Design with Nature Now coeditor Karen M’Closkey recently returned from a global landscape architecture conference that overlapped with the end of the exhibit in Taipei, and says the dynamic venue helped ensure that the exhibition was packed. “They’ve renovated all these buildings, there are small shops and bookstores,” she says. “It was busy with people the whole time, and on the pedestrian street between the buildings, there were always performances and people selling things. It was a very lively place.”

In Taipei alone, roughly 9,600 people attended the exhibition, says curator Matt Chu, deputy secretary general of the Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects. The Taipei exhibition included guided tours, weekend lectures with Taiwanese government officials, and a two-day symposium as the installation came to a close in mid-October.

Over 600 attendees took one of the guided tours offered by TILA volunteers and adjunct professors, Chu says, each tour beginning with a deep introduction to ecological design projects and concepts in the auditorium. “Every tour was packed, and we were so thrilled by positive feedback from the audience,” Chu says.

Themes That Resonate

The 25 large-scale environmental design projects showcased in Design with Nature Now are organized into five major themes: Big Wilds, Rising Tides, Fresh Waters, Toxic Lands, and Urban Futures. The exhibits were likewise split into five thematic categories, but also included a section on McHarg himself, called The House We Live In, and a gallery of works by artist and landscape architect Laurel McSherry, created during her stint as a Fulbright Scholar in McHarg’s homeland of Scotland. In both Nanjing and Taipei, local government agencies augmented the exhibits by connecting the themes to their own environmental efforts around climate change and resilience.

Three of the thematic projects highlighted in Design with Nature Now are located in China—including a focus on Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen—but that’s hardly the only reason the book has found a welcome audience there.

“The importance of nature to Chinese culture is ancient, so I think there’s that historic connection,” Steiner says. “But also in a contemporary sense, it’s the biggest country in the world in terms of population, it’s become majority urban . . . so the issues of urbanization, loss of biodiversity, climate change—they’re not abstract. There’s a lot of interest politically, both in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic, in addressing these issues. I think the five big themes that we identified resonate very much.”

In addition to the larger-than-life reproductions of maps, photographs, and landscapes, the exhibits included 3D models and updated information on projects featured in the book and original exhibit.

In Taipei the exhibit included a three-dimensional model of the city. And one of Chu’s favorite installations in Taipei brought new clarity to a concept introduced in McHarg’s 1969 book. McHarg and his students had famously sliced up contoured landscapes, such as that of Staten Island, New York, into different layers—showing existing land uses alongside hand-drawn maps of the area’s physiography, water table, wildlife habitat, forest cover, and tidal inundation, among other ecological features—in an analog precursor to geographic information system (GIS) mapping.

“In the original exhibition in Philadelphia, they had those 18 Staten Island graphics on the wall,” Chu says. “But I kind of stacked them using transparent panels, so visitors can see all the different layers—the geology, the hydrology, the vegetation, all the layers—the way Ian McHarg explained how nature would influence culture and where development should go.”

Five years after the Penn exhibition, Chu was also able to display updated photos from the landscape architecture firm Field Operations, which has completed early phases of two major projects featured in Design with Nature Now: Freshkills Park in New York, which was once the largest landfill in the world, and Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen. “So it’s kind of a comparison with five years ago, when they were only in the planning phase,” Chu says. “They’ve got North Park, Phase One built in Freshkills Park, and in Shenzhen they got Guiwan Park built. And you can see the process, how it’s come from the planning phase, to design, to building it, and see how designing with nature really came true.”

The exhibits also included video, notes Steiner, with displays including a snippet from a late-1960s McHarg documentary; a film by McSherry that synced the waxing spring daylight hours of Glasgow with cinematic scenes in real time; and previously recorded live-cam footage of wildlife in the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor using an underpass to cross beneath a busy road. “Kids would all be huddled around watching the animals go through the underpass,” says Steiner, who notes that the curiosity went both ways, as bears, coyotes, and other animals came up to inspect the camera at close range.

The Nanjing and Taipei exhibits were such a success that other organizations are already inquiring about hosting the exhibits next year. Steiner says the Nanjing exhibit is slated to move to Shanghai next summer, while in Taiwan, Chu says, “So far we have the Taoyuan City Library and Kaohsiung National Science and Technology Museum expressing their willingness to exhibit next year,” as well as interest from Taiwan’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency.

Chu said the exhibition helped raise the visibility of the landscape architecture profession locally. “Even though Ian McHarg actually came to Taiwan about 40 years ago, to help Taiwan establish its National Parks system, people in Taiwan still associate the profession more with horticulture or gardening,” Chu says. “So this exhibition really opened their eyes [to the idea] that landscape architects can help with things like climate change and biodiversity loss using large-scale planning and design.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Visitors explore the Design with Nature Now exhibit in Taipei. Credit: Matt Chu.