Suzhou, an ancient canal city in the Yangtze River Delta, is best known as home of the Chinese landscape tradition - containing an historic city center dotted with serene parks, promenades, and courtyard gardens, which are collectively listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. EDAW carried that spirit into the enormous task of completing the 550-hectare master plan surrounding the city's Jinji Lake. EDAW's work included developing urban design principles and design and construction of multiple landscape architecture projects, many still under construction today.

Over the years, EDAW completed a Millennium Park, a Camphor Forest, a Harbor Side Plaza, a Sculpture Park, a Maple Forest, and several waterfront promenades. The end result is a lakefront that is an award-winning collage of places with a vernacular design sensibility that makes Jinji a fitting new chapter in the evolving story of Chinese landscape. The work was lauded in a review last fall in the New York Times as a place "where progress is a walk in the park."

The Jinji Lake work became an integral factor in EDAW's participation in the comprehensive exhibition 'Dresden in China - China in Dresden.' Concurrently organized under the patronage of the Presidents of China and Germany, with the support of the National Art Museum of China and the Goethe Institute, the exhibition explores the contemporary resonances of the world's oldest existing strain of land design - the architecture of the Chinese landscape. EDAW's installation for the topic, "Chinese Gardens for Living," is currently on display at Dresden's Pillnitz Palace.

Titled Garden Transition, the exhibit features a key design element found throughout the Jinji Lake projects - the light totem. In this case, translucent films of cropped imagery showing Suzhou's ancient gardens have been inserted into the totems. The installation is composed of twelve poles in total, arranged in three sub-groups that meander around the southeast corner of the installation site, diagonally opposite a two-hundred year old Chinese Pavilion. By day, they are a series of markers, leading curious visitors through the palace grounds; in the evenings, they light up, casting aromatic glimmers of Suzhou cityscapes into the dusk and night skies.

"Garden Transition celebrates the original essence and transcendental qualities of Chinese classical gardens by reproducing full-scale but distorted slices of garden images in transition from the original garden experience. Together, these 'borrowed landscapes' are temporally moved into the exhibition event and palace grounds, creating new spatial sequences within the existing trees of the installation site," says Alfred Fulton, a senior associate from the Hong Kong landscape studio.