Landscape Architects Confront Climate Change in the Exhibition Designers of Mountain and Water

In this video, Jungyoon Kim, exhibition curator and associate professor in practice of landscape architecture at the GSD, introduces Designers of Mountain and Water, co-organized with the Korea Institute at Harvard.

The exhibition features 58 landscape architecture projects across Asia, organized by “bioregion”—geographic areas defined not by nations, but by climate, ecology, and geology: “the borders that nature drew.” Intricate line drawings in the Druker Design Gallery map these bioregions and the terrain that designers of mountain and water engage.

The Sinographic compound 山水, meaning “mountain and water,” is shared across many Asian contexts—as shanshui in China, sansui in Japan, and sansu in Korea. Historically tied to artistic and philosophical visions of the natural world, the term evokes the vital elements of a dynamic landscape.

Amid climate change, the exhibition asks: What elements and dimensions of nature are essential today to designing sustainable spaces for human habitation and flourishing?