News

TVB Pearl Magazine highlighted an 80-year-old traditional pottery kiln in Tuen Mun that once produced tableware and flower pots for Hong Kong. This last existing local Dragon Kiln went out of business in the 1980s and is now fighting to become a living museum and heritage community centre.

In this news story, Susanne Trumpf was interviewed and commented on the state of the Dragon Kiln and the importance of it to not only the community but also the field of Landscape Architecture.

A Dragon’s Tale, TVB Pearl, 2022-11-27, 20:00, 23’45”, Reporter: Tina Jiang

Ivan Valin and Susanne Trumpf discussed in this online panel discussion the ambitions of TAL-L and the potential for a more productive, grounded, and innovative set of material practices that might be found in Hong Kong. Panellists representing different streams of material expertise: collection, application, and discovery, discussed their own work and questions framed by the TAL-L project. Matthew Siebert, from the University of Virgina, discussed the notion of material agencies and its impact on forms of practice. Man Tsang, from the Material Resource Center at Polytechnical University shared her work on developing material resource archives. And Lidia Ratoi, from HKU Department of Architecture, shared her experiences with material experimentation and robotic fabrication.

The exhibition, co-curated by Ivan Valin, Susanne Trumpf, and Ceci Wong showcased a cycle of material research and experimentation within the built environment disciplines. Part physical archive, part interactive map, part fabricated catalog, the exhibit documented local materials and related material experiments. It explored the compositions of Hong Kong, uncovering the material artifacts of ground, structure, and infrastructure while tracing their origins and impacts. The exhibition offered a glimpse into TAL-L, a living innovation archive that reframes our understanding of materials and builds new connections between landscape, architecture, environment and nature.

Susanne and Ivan have published in the OASE Journals’ #110 issue ‘A project of the soil’. The paper with the title ‘Taxon|Archive|Lab - Library: Soils for the regeneration of the urban landscape’ investigates the potential to reclaim urban soils as a dynamic resource in remaking the city for a more sustainable future. Student-led archival exercises, and open-ended material experimentations around TAL-L are described as a foundation to restore deep knowledge about soils within the landscape architectural education.

Susanne was selected as the recipient of the Faculty Teaching Award 2021 for her efforts to set up a pedagogy around landscape materials. The Panel was impressed with the awardee’s dedication to teaching, and the innovative pedagogical approaches to enduring excellence to enhance student learning experiences and learning outcomes.

Ivan leads a site visit to Pui O, Lantau, for site investigations to launch a design project to propose interventions in a degraded agricultural zone and emergent freshwater marsh. As part of the study, students mapped plant and water conditions and sampled soils along a wet-dry gradient line. These samples tested the process of student-led soil archive inputs.

Susanne presented ‘Exploring Urban Ground: Investigating Locally Sourced Earthen Materials through Design Research in Landscape Architectural Education’ at the 2021 ECLAS conference. The paper examines material research in landscape education, asking how local earthen construction materials can be integrated into the origin stories of their local context.

Susanne teaches Landscape Media II, a course that introduces students to techniques in material testing and digital fabrication as an iterative part of the design process.

Inspired by hands-on testing of materials and relevant production processes, students developed a one-person seat or shelter. During the design process, students worked with a combination of digital and analogue fabrication techniques; drawings, mock-ups, and 1:1 prototypes.

Susanne presented ‘Hands-on Online: Challenges and Learnings from Teaching Landscape Materials and Fabrication from the Kitchen Table’ at the conference which was organised as a response to the unprecedented changes faced by the world in 2020. It documented and reflected the diverse perspectives of educators at this point in time.

The paper investigates the learnings from experimental working with materials during remote learning and presents the setting up of ‘home-fablabs’ in March 2020.

Susanne tought an elective research seminar that integrated hands-on material fabrication with technical and theoretical discussions.

The seminar introduced key concepts of material flows and examined the use of local earthen materials in contemporary landscape architecture. It used the exploration of material qualities as a tool to understand wider concepts of sustainability, urban resources, as well as fabrication and analysis technologies. Students were challenged by the theoretical, environmental, and social objections of extracting soil from the urban ground.