Qixuan YANG landscape architect Portfolio 2016
I grew up in the south of China until age of ten then in Paris. Before studying Landscape Architecture, I studied Engineering Sciences and History of Art which provided me a strong rigour and a solid cultural baggage for the design process. My last four years in Landscape Architecture studies taught me how to design in a wide range of scales, from urban public space to regional planning; also how forms create emotions and how every single detail should support the general concept. I had the opportunity to live and to design in different countries (Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, Poland, Slovakia and Nigeria), these experiences made me fully aware of the importance of the cultural aspect, the plurality of approaches and meanings of the landscape. The diversity of my studies and of the countries I’ve lived gave me the desire to explore different contexts to feed my practice and knowledge. Now recently graduated and just finished a three-month internship, I would like to work in Norway in order to continue this exploration process with Norwegian and more generally Scandinavian projects. Always curious, always learning and sharing, I like designing by humming with good mood. I am someone of "both-and": both eastern and western, scientific and artistic, hand and digital, team player and independent, like handling concepts as well as getting fingers dirty.
Front cover: landscape model research with bed sheet, 2014 Back cover: The land remembers of the Danube - South of Bratislava, 2016 Personal photographs
Qixuan YANG
01.02.1991 / 25 year old / French nationality qixuanyang@gmail.com / 998 55 177 c/o Baldron, Fastings gate 4, 0358, Oslo issuu.com/qixuanyang
f r e n c h landscape architect
SOFTWARE Id/Ai/Ps AutoCAD QGIS SketchUp Rhino + Grasshopper Word/Excel
EDUCATION 2012 - 2016 Versailles, France 2014 Germany/Scotland
Landscape Architecture DPLG (State Diploma) École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage de Versailles European Masters in Landscape Architecture (EMiLA) Leibniz Universität Hannover & Edinburgh College of Art
2009 - 2012 Paris, France
BA Hons. (Licence) History of Art / Philosophy Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
2009 Paris, France
A-Level Sciences (Baccalauréat S) - Engineering Sciences Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say, Paris
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LANGUAGES French English German Mandarin Cantonese Norwegian
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EXPERIENCES 09 - 11.2016 Paris, France
Internship at Florence Mercier Paysagiste Sketch of new urban boulevard (Marseille) / General design for a square (Amiens) / Planting scheme for private garden (Rueil) / Technical design for riverbank revitalisation (Marne river) and for eco-district (Montreuil).
09.2015 - 03.2016 Haute-Savoie, France
Regional Energyscape Study — Client: French Electricity Transmission Network (RTE) Assessment and spatial designs for the change of a high-tension power line between Geneva’s suburb and the French Alps.
08.2014 Ammerland, Germany
Summerschool EMiLA 2014 “Ammerland Running Out of Land” Designing strategies for Ammerland’s competing land use demands in an international students team.
07.2013 Versailles, France
Laureate of international students workshop 6th Assises Européennes du Paysage Global hydrological strategy for the agricultural plain of Versailles.
03.2013 Toulouse, France
Internship at landscaping compagny Pépinières du Languedoc Landscaping works for public and private sector clients: soil preparation, planting, staking, stone work etc.
07.2011 Shanghai, China
Internship at Shanghai Landscape Architecture Design Institute Follow-up of the landscape design competition of the planning of the new city of Taicang.
07 - 08.2010 Missiwobe, Togo
Reforestation program in an NGO Teak reforestation and awareness campaign in a village of the central region of Togo.
INTERESTS
REFERENCES
Hitch-hiking and hiking Poetry and contemporary dance Practice of clarinet, piano & guitar Community gardening in an association
Bernadette Blanchon Architect, supervisor of Masters thesis b.blanchon@ecole-paysage.fr Florence Mercier Landscape architect, former employer agence@fmpaysage.fr
TOOLS
My formal studies in Engineering Sciences and History of Art helped me to be creative and rigorous. Design tools allow me to experiment, to synthesise and to communicate ideas. I strongly believe that digital tools are not a mimesis of hand ones but lead to other aesthetics and other ways to design.
DRAWING 1
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1: Hand drawn levelling study 2: On the spot sketch 3: Photoshop drawing 4: Paving pattern research with Grasshopper 5: Detail drawings with Autocad
PHOTOGRAPHY 1 2
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1: Site exploration with Polaroid 2: Collecting landscapes from airplane window with my mobile phone 3: Blur effect research with 35mm analog camera
MAPPING / INFOGRAPHIC 1
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1: Soil occupation map of the Chablais Alps by using GIS data 2: Mapping the urban-rural relationship of Hanover City 3: Infographic panel of the social infrastructure of Nigeria's coast
MODEL
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1: 3D landscape model with Grasshopper and OSM data 2: Laser cut model with wood, moss, clay and acrylic sheet
Exercice 7 - Elk Site Modelling Südliche Leineaue, Hannover Qixuan YANG
BORDER
ENERGY
TERRITORY
NATURE IN CITY
PUBLIC SPACE
"Let me be the jewel of Bratislava", whispered the daughter of Danube, named forest of Pečna. Bratislava, Slovakia
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The blooming after the wall Berlin, Germany
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Short-life oil sands vs. sustainable living patchwork Ondo State, Nigeria Make landscape with power lines Chablais Alps, France
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"Such a beautiful garden !" Canton of Saverne, France Unser Schönes Ammerland Ammerland, Germany
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"Whether I am tomb or treasure" Krakow, Poland Solutions are always nearby Stains, Seine-St-Denis, France
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The counterpoint Paris XIVe, France
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Various works at landscape architecture office Florence Mercier Paysagiste Paris, France
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"Let me be the jewel of Bratislava", whispered the daughter of Danube, named forest of Pečna.
Framework Topic
Final diploma - ENSP 4th year Rehabilitation of an urban forest regarding urban growth and hydrological dynamics
Location
Bratislava, Slovakia
Duration
6 months
Jury
Florence Mercier (diploma director), Bruno Tanant (French landscape architect), Maguelonne Déjant-Pons (Council of Europe), Michal Bogar (Slovakian architect)
How to design in an unfamiliar context? What did I learn during the last four years in Versailles and how do I work? What can I bring and share? The final diploma as an exploratory and reflexive work. The forest of Pečna is located along the Danube river and the Austria-Slovakian border (formally the Iron Curtain), close to the city centre, and stands as a transitional space between the capital of Slovakia and Austrian countryside. It is a complex case where overlays different desires for the landscape — environmental protection, leisure demands and urban pressure. It involves different themes — cross-border territory, history and memory, human and ecological flows, myth and fiction. Nourished by the works of the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels and the scientist Philip Ball, phenomenological approach and geometry in nature are important parts of my process. The project combines long-term and large-scale planning (new arm of the Danube river and forest management) with local triggering interventions (public spaces and citizen initiatives).
Polaroids and hand drawings as tools of representation and communication
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Combiner renaturation écologique Structurer ave l’eau et les axes et production sylvicole
Poser des points forts d’usages
historiques
Créer des séquences dans la
Inscrire dans le contexte
traversée autoroutière
Drawings extracted from an imaginary story between the site and its surroundings, between its past and present
Finding the purposes of the project by collage: to see the human and natural dynamics as flows, to sculpt the vegetation between the wild and shaped states
2 km
400 m
140 m
150 m
150 m
300 m
250 m
200 m
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160 m
250 m
110 m
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Framework Topic
The blooming after the wall
Masters dissertation - ENSP 3rd year Ecological strategies in the reconversions of the no man’s land of Berlin wall
Location
Berlin, Germany
Duration
4 months
Supervisor Sponsor
Bernadette Blanchon The Franco-German Youth Office
My dissertation studies the no man’s land of the Berlin Wall from the joint angle of spatial recomposition and ecological regeneration. As form, it has disrupted the urban morphology and landscape unities. As matter, the exhaustion of the soil during decades has created a “zero degrees” substrate. To reclaim this infertile ground and space, what does an “ecological project” mean ? How and what spatial figures and narrative meanings does it create? Through three study cases, my research shows the multiplicity and the evolution of the approaches under the notion of “ecological projects”, from local district to metropolitan scale, from citizens’ initiative to state project, from voluntaristic reforestation to the promotion of wastelands, from the desire to go back to a Berlin before the Cold War to the will to turn to the city of tomorrow. Naturschutzturm The rubber
Landschaftspark Rudow-Altglienicke The staple
Extracting concepts from the analysis: spatial figures of the three study cases
Grünes Band Berlin The necklace
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Extracting spatial concepts from the competition of Berlin Morgen (1991)
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1990
Rudow West Berlin
Altglienicke East Berlin
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500 m
Diachronic maps using GIS data revealing the impacts of the Berlin wall
Understanding the components of the landscape Transformations of no man's land of the Berlin wall with the vegetation.
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Example of the impact of oil sands extraction on Cold Lake, Canada
Framework Topic
Short-life oil sands vs. sustainable living patchwork
Masters project - Leibniz Universität Hannover Designing the landscapes of the Nigeria's coast with the coming of the oil sands industry
Location
Ondo state, Nigeria
Duration
3 months
Supervisors Team
Christina Milos, Christian Werthmann GwenaĂŤlle Charrier
Oil sands extraction may take place soon in Nigeria. At the same time, because of the lack of financial, political and human investments, land potential in the country is underexploited. In 2050, Nigeria will be the 3th most populous country of the world. How will be the metropolitan landscape between Lagos and Benin City? How many people and how will they eat? Our work focuses on how we can prepare the ground. By using oil sands in-situ operations as an instrument for the future land planning, we think that different spatial components (swamp forest, city, farming, wood industry, oil sands) can coexist together, shaping a patchwork system. Instead of waiting the coming of oil sands operations and its end, things should start now.
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Patchwork strategy Infrastructures
Food and energy production Urban expansion
Bitumen exploration
Bitumen exploitation 70 years
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Otikipupa
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Irele
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Overhead power line crossing the village Viuz-en-Sallaz in the Chablais Alps
Framework Topic
Make landscape with power lines
Regional Energyscape Study - ENSP 4th year Assessment and spatial designs for the change of a 50 km long high voltage power line
Location
Between Geneva’s suburb and the French Alps
Duration
7 months
Client Supervisor Team
French Electricity Transmission Network (RTE) Michel Collin Clothilde Josserand, Olivia Zanchi
With increasing demands for energy and consolidation of the European electricity network, the capacity of a cross-border high voltage power line in the Chablais Alps will be increased, and by the same occasion its implantation be changed. Our role is to help RTE to work on the acceptability of the project and find solutions for how to move the line regarding the environmental, social and urbanistic issues. Instead of considering power lines in term of "impact", we prefer thinking how they can make landscape. We have at the first stage brought out a global vision of the power line and its interactions with the mountain landscape context. Then we have developed several scenarios to demonstrate how this change could be positive for local developments — by a new maintenance of the surroundings or by compensatory strategies.
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Diversion of the power line as an opportunity to revitalise a perishing vale in Viuz-en-Sallaz
The entry of the village Viuz-en-Sallaz: pylon as landmark
Imagining and representing different scenarios
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Represent and communicate the future of Saverne with shadow puppets
Framework Topic
"Such a beautiful garden !"
Territorial diagnosis - ENSP 2rd year Diagnosis of the landscape issues and policies of a French canton
Location
Canton of Saverne, Bas-Rhin, France
Duration
8 months
Supervisors Team
Sophie Bonin, Alain Freytet, Monique Toublanc Marie Antoni, Pauline Chycki, Agnès Jacquin
The canton of Saverne, located between the Vosges and the Alsatian plain, presents some of the most common landscape issues in France: urban sprawl, intensive farming, new infrastructure and tourist pressure. By combining desktop research and fieldwork, this analysis aims to represent a prospective diagnosis of the region. It was an occasion to see more clearly the role of landscape architects for the regional development among the interplay of stakeholders and landscape policies. Therefore, we developed different tools - diagrams, maps, drawings - to share our vision of Saverne in a narrative way.
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Extract of the hand drawn landscape map of Saverne
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Details of the models made during the EMiLA summerschool
Framework Topic
International Summerschool - EMiLA Designing strategies for Ammerland’s competing land use demands
Unser Schönes Ammerland
Location
Ammerland, Lower-Saxony, Germany
Duration
10 days
Supervisors
Verena Butt, Karin Helms, Takeo Kawakita, Ana Kučan, Dihua Li, Martin Prominski, Hille von Seggern, Jorg Sieweke, Tiago Torres-Campos, etc.
Ammerland's historical park-like landscape is increasingly challenged by competing land use demands, such as an expanding industrialised agriculture, ongoing construction activities, the expansion of nature reserves and peat extraction. The summerschool aims to work on regional landscape design by developing spatial strategies based on the natural and man-made structures and systems of cooperations from different activities. It was an opportunity to meet local stakeholders, and also to exchange differents visions and practices from various schools of landscape architecture and countries.
Interactive model of Ammerland
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Concentration camp of Płaszów
Framework
"Whether I am tomb or treasure"
Topic
Masters project - Edinburgh College of Art 5rd year Design strategies on former concentration camp of Płaszów
Location
Krakow, Poland
Duration
3 months
Supervisors
Kenny Fraser, Chris Rankin
Place of memory of a formal concentration camp, or 150 ha of greenery in a city which lacks so much, Plaszow in Krakow is situated between these two poles which are apparently antinomic. Inspired by a poem of Paul Valery, the project brings face to face the representation and the interpretation of the elements of the site. It offers a polysemy of the site by shaping a vegetation between heterogeneousness and unity, between wildness and geometry.
Vegetation management strategy diagram
21 MASTERPLAN, 2045 Woodland Shrub
High grass Low grass
Existing trees
Alignement trees
Fagus sylvatica Purpurea
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Apple trees
Urban densification Limit of the former Plaszow concentration camp
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Non-intervention areas 1 Bednarski Park 2 Krakus Mound 3 Cemetery 4 Allotments
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5 Liban quarry 6 Ehrenpries quarry 7 Water treatment plant 5 3
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5 ha
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Clearings
8 Linear clearing 9 austro-hongarian clearing planted trees 10 geological clearing 11 Woodland park Fomer Plaszow concentration camp 12 Ruins of jewish cemetery 13 Ruins of the preburial of the former camp 14 Ruins of the barack of the former camp 15 Remains of AustroHongarian fortications
16 Easily visible traces of the camp 17 50cm high terraces revealing the dimension of the barracks of the former camp
Cemetery
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Gardening session with children at Friche Durand
Framework Topic
Solutions are always nearby
Studio/work site - ENSP 1st year Transforming an urban wasteland by using on-site resourcces
Location
Friche Durand, Stains, Seine-Saint-Denis, France
Duration
2012 - in progress
Supervisors
Gabriel Chauvel then association CHIFOUMI
Team
Fifteen people of the class DPLG 2012-2016
It’s a story of 8300 m2 wasteland transformed into a convivial place in a suburb of Northern Paris. Our project, including a threeday construction work phase, sets recycling on-site resources (existing vegetation, demolition materials) and participation with inhabitants as inherent parts of the design process. Following our intervention, an agreement has been signed with the city and we come back regularly for diverse interventions. Since 2013, an educational chicken coop and a kitchen garden have been built, where the children from the schools nearby have their gardening lessons.
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Photo of the site
Framework Topic
The counterpoint
Studio 1st year - ENSP Rehabilitation of a parisian square
Location
Square Ferdinand-Brunot, Paris XIVe
Duration
2 months
Supervisors
Thierry Kandjee, Matthias PrĂŠvot
What is an haussmannian square and what is its relevance in the Paris of today? Referring to the notion of the counterpoint in music and the theories of Andrea Branzi, this project sets a flexible and expandable planting structure. It settles in the continuity of the Parisian boulevards and squares system, which allows the host of various contemporary uses and needs.
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Framework
Various works at landscape architecture office Florence Mercier Paysagiste
Topic
Internship - ENSP 4th year Participation to diverse landscape projects, from sketch to detailing phase
Location
Paris, France
Duration
3 months
At Florence Mercier Paysagiste, I had the opportunity to be involved to different projects, from private garden to infrastructural design. Besides design works, I was also in contact with suppliers and participated to site meeting. Florence Mercier gave me a great responsibility, especially for the sketch of the new urban boulevard and development project in Marseille. I worked with topographical survey plan, planning documents of the city, and I was the discussion partner with our collaborators — architects and engineers. During my internship, I enjoyed a lot discussing with Florence Mercier. Her sense of geometry/geography, her conviction of the social dimension of landscape projects were a great lesson for a young landscape architect that I am.
27 Paul Claudel Square — General Design (Amiens,1,5 ha) My work for this project was car park integration, tree layout and circulation design. In the east, the square is cleary delimitated by an edge with shrubs. In the west, several connections to the road are created. The pavement expands and enters to the square. A curvy path splits the square into two parts. In the northern part, an orthogonal grid determinates the spatiality of the fruit trees, the clearings and the furniture. Whereas in the sheep grazing area in the southern part, copses are designed in organic shapes.
New urban boulevard and public spaces for development project — Diagnosis/Sketch (Marseille, with ANMA Architects, 1 km of road, 2 ha of park) In this project, my role was to define a typology of sections for the new boulevard, and to propose levelling and rain water management strategy for the new park. Four standard sections of the boulevard are established, creating a variety of the widths. For the park, the topography is re-designed to create several rainwater harvesting basins. A system of ramps and stairs connects the public spaces to the new buildings and to the urban boulevard, it allows a fluidity of pedestrian circulation.