Yanning Mu

Dynamic Monument

Landscape Architecture - MLA

Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)

yanningmu42@gmail.com

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Project description

I aim to create a landscape that continues the narrative of the Azores' landscape and celebrates its true essence.

The Azores archipelago is a young land. Here, the land is in a natural cycle of creation and destruction: new lands are created by volcanic activity and disappear under the wash of the sea; existing landscapes are destroyed by volcanic activity, and new ecosystems and human communities quickly emerge on them. Here, the dynamic is a very distinguishing feature. But the true essence of the Azorean landscape is the relationship of human beings living with this ever-changing world. The settlers of the Azores have always lived in this unique landscape and have not only been influenced by it but have also been involved in the process of establishing the ecosystem from the moment the new land was formed.

I am proposing a responsive park sequence in Capelinhos, the most recent eruption zone, a central area of natural forces, which is predicted to disappear by 2118 due to coastal erosion and climate change. The landscape sequence will extend the space for human activity into this currently protected area, linking the lives of the locals to this land of radical change, and using the park's hardscape and plant elements as instruments of response to the 'cycle of creation and destruction', exploring how they respond to it over more than a hundred-year period. People move horizontally in the Link system and Crater gardens and vertically underground in the Vent Towers, exploring the inner connection with nature. In the future, when everything else fades into the waves, the ruins of the towers will become ecological hotspots like basaltic islands, and the life of the plants that originally grew in the garden will continue elsewhere...