A pavilion can be a way to expand a garden: in Shenzhen, Lily Zhang and Wataru Shinji conceived Earth Garden at Bay Park as a detached, modular structure to inhabit the garden it stands in.
Earth Garden combines lightweight, translucent enclosures with the planting around them. The enclosures reflect their natural surroundings and integrate with the flowerbeds, shrubs and mature trees of the garden.
In the statement for their CUHK lecture, Zhang and Shinji argue that "the imbalance of human and nature calls for a radical transformation of the boundary separating the two," and they frame design as the work of making room for all living things, the comfort of other species included, rather than for people alone.
They practise across the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and mainland China, and teach at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in its inaugural Practice in Residence programme. Zhang, who describes her work as "designing environment through the interaction of the natural and the artificial," has trained in offices in Tokyo, New York and San Francisco, among them those of Junya Ishigami and Toyo Ito, and now researches how materials are produced, consumed, traded, preserved and displayed around the world.
Shinji spent nearly eight years at junya.ishigami+associates in Tokyo as Senior Designer and Project Lead, where he led several international, award-winning projects, among them the Park Vijversburg Visitors Center in Tytsjerk. His work and teaching have taken him around the world, often relocating to study environmental conditions and processes so as to redesign the natural environment. He has taught at Harvard, Princeton and Rice, at the Mendrisio academy and in Oslo, and at Chulalongkorn University.
