Tracing Memory in Garden Patterns

In the final year of my undergraduate study, I undertook Project Arcadia — a spatial research project rooted in the study of Suzhou’s classical garden Zhuozheng Yuan (The Humble Administrator’s Garden). The aim was not to replicate its physical forms, but to understand and reimagine its emotional and spatial logic.

Through field observation, measured drawings, and serial sketches, I analysed fifty recurring spatial patterns from traditional Chinese gardens. These were distilled into ten spatial archetypes, encompassing gestures such as concealment and reveal, compression and release, borrowed scenery, and unexpected turns.

From this vocabulary, I embarked on a second design stage: a speculative composition, weaving these archetypes into a new, imagined landscape. The result was neither mimicry nor abstraction, but a contemporary reinterpretation of garden thinking — one that sought not to represent, but to resonate.

Project Arcadia was my first declaration of belief:
that architecture begins with emotion,
that drawing can remember,
and that even the silence between courtyards has something to say.

曲径未尽，已闻心声。