GSD MLA I AP Essay

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GSD MLA I AP Essay


Towards the Future: Landscape + Urbanism based on Sustainability


Wilson, Rui QIAN, Master of Urban Design

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Applicant to the MLA I AP program at Graduate School of Design, Harvard University



This is Wilson, Rui Qian from China recently achieved Master of Urban Design degree from University of Michigan, and currently working as the Research Assistant of Professor Doug Kelbaugh. With my sincerest regards, I am applying to the Master of Landscape Architecture I AP program at Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. For GSD, as the top design school around the world, really attracts me a lot since my undergrad school years, and where students and faculties are thriving to focus on the possibilities of designing with the future, from visions to the action.


VISIONS: City Planet in the Urban Century


Currently, City becomes the key word of the world, because so far city is the most efficient creature that can coordinate human with various spheres on this planet in a sustainable way, although admittedly, there exist the environmental paradox of cities(Doug Kelbaugh, FAIA): when human inhabit dense urban space, they decrease their impact on the global environment more than they increase their impact on the local environment; in other words, their ecological footprints per capita are smaller than in low-density sprawl. Yet, in the coming decades, 70% world population will live in cities. Thus, I would say, NOW, we are stepping in an urban century; and as an urban design graduate, I do believe that Cities are the future and the vision for human to survive from all the potential challenges, therefore we need to search as many paths to deliver the sustainability back to the "city planet”, while Landscape Architecture certainly serves as the most fundamental and crucial way towards the vision, along with urbanism and sustainability stewardship


STRATEGY: Landscape + Urbanism to Sustainable Vision


Just as Professor Carl Steinitz stated in his paper years ago, scale matters. Indeed, scale enjoys so much influence on the realization of the sustainable vision, that Landscape need to work collaborated with urbanism; at large scale landscape means planning a healthy environmental baseline for the regional development , for medium scale, landscape could provide the city/ districts/ neighborhood with a framework integrated with other systems to lay out the constraints and opportunities, especially from the view of infrastructures development (including ecological , municipal, and social infrastructures, and at micro scale, I would like to say landscape is more of a toolbox. Borrowing from Lewis Mumford, Landscape at this scale is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matters into the living symbols of art, and biological reproduction into social creativity.

Given that scale maters, time actually even more. Landscape + Urbanism, developing with human history, mean the opportunity for me to re-discover the relationship between human and earth from past to the future, which has already transformed for many times. I would like to chronologize it into 3 periods of time. Demanding from the earth: human had been asking for all the resources from the earth, time to time, from the age of cultivation and production simply for life support, to geometric aesthetics, then to the period of gothic and baroque age to highlight the religion belief and the progress of art, and then the modernism to embrace the technology progress; Suffering from the demands: human have been experiencing food shortage, energy crisis, and climate destabilization, consequently to post-modernism. In this period, human have exhaust most of the earth, that the landscape of the blue planet turned black. Learning from the earth and suffer: till now, professionals, students, professors start changing the “legacy”, with the emergence of the landscape urbanism, and ecological urbanism, et cetera, to provoke the redefinition of the new aesthetics for human to sustain this planet environmentally, culturally, and economically. And now, for my generation, I am lucky and honored enough to witness this transformation, eventually from learning from the earth to living with the earth.


TACTICS and ACTION: Design through Research at GSD


With the goal clearly set, it is time to draft a roadmap and take actions towards the vision. On my roadmap, I am pretty convinced that all roads direct me to start at GSD.

The significance of design methodologies is quite well understood to me, since 2010, I have met Professor Steinitz in his lecture “the way of design”. And his idea of “Design through research, and Design as a verb” really attracts me a lot, for it is so much wiser to learn how to fish rather than just to acquire fish from market. With a good method, through scientific study and analysis, the environmental risks of decision making will be directly reduced, as well as the economic and social ones. This is much more important than where to plant a tree, or what material will be better fit for a pond edge. Back to the fact that scale matters and time even more, as Galileo said, many devices working on one scale does not on others. What really shape the earth are the decisions made by the professionals and experts at the medium large scale, with more risks. Hence, Landscape and Urbanism fascinate me a lot; especially in China, based on my experience of writing critics and teaching, the rational thinking and attitude are particularly in need rather than the current situation, that ambitious and crazy urbanization rush across the country in every filed, even in the colleges. I deeply felt responsible to change this, which adds really more for me to apply to the top program at the top school.

And, another point, GSD has always been the place for professionals, students, and professors to cherish the same goal and ideals towards a great vision. Since the Landscape program was first initialed in GSD, GSD serves as the pacer of this field. I will be really honored to be part of GSD learning how to deliver the sustainability and resilience back to Earth, and then take the actions, design through research and design with future.

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