Rewilding the Sky with Salad Dressing Landscape Architects

About this event

The notion of ‘Rewilding the Sky’ emerges from the rise of taller, denser skyscrapers which reflect both our desires and anxieties. The rooftop garden is now a popular trend in landscape architecture design. Building upon the totem of anthropocentrism, our talk speculates on how these rooftop spaces can offer more than just artificial land driven by capitalism. Can a skyscraper leave a positive legacy in the strata of geology?

‘Rewilding the sky’ describes new altruism in which we can share our environment and spaces with other living beings - both physical and digital. As a landscape architecture practice, we deal with the life science of negotiating between humans and other living beings.

We continually reassess our relationship with nature and the processes of co-evolution. With the advancement of technology, complex algorithms and big data enables us to see into the future, as well as the deep time to re-examine our existence and values.

In this lecture, we will share a body of constructed and speculative projects that narrate the stories of ‘rewilding the sky’, and reimagine the present moment of climate and ecological crisis oscillating between a far-distant future and past.

Post-lecture reception and book launch

Following the lecture, please join us in officially launching the award-winning The Big Asian Book of Landscape Architecture which offers one of the first comprehensive discussions of contemporary landscape architecture practice across the Asian region. Edited by Jillian Walliss from the University of Melbourne and Heike Rahmann from RMIT University, this book brings together established designers and thinkers with those of the new generation, to explore what it means to design, do business, and think about nature, space, and urbanism with an Asian sensibility.

Hear from Director of Asialink Arts Dr Pippa Dickson, wander around the exhibition celebrating the design excellence of Singapore and toast the important contribution that this book makes to a discipline that has traditionally been dominated by North American and European influences.

About the speakers

In 2002, Chang Huai-yan established the Singaporean-based landscape architecture practice Salad Dressing. Shaped by the forces and challenges facing humanity during this post-Anthropocene transition, Salad Dressing’s projects can be found across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and most recently Dubai, in the award-winning Singapore Pavilion ( in collaboration with WOHA) at World Expo 2020.

Malaysian-born Huai-yan began his career in Bali being mentored by Australian landscape architect Made Wijaya (Michael White). This experience inspired Huai-yan to appreciate tropical landscapes along with his Asian roots. These ideas remain influential in the evolution of his practice which is inspired by aspects of contemporary culture defined by information technology, genomic science and cosmic explorations.

Director of design, Goh Yu Han joined Salad Dressing in 2010,  Trained as a landscape architect with a background in arts, Malaysian-born Yu Han’s design philosophy is shaped by her continuing interest in art history and Eastern literature, along with concepts of a post-humanist driven ecology. In particular, she sees the current inequalities of our time - from slavery to the fight against sexism, to the current ecological struggle against speciesism as major instigators for design change.