Touch-Starved Touch Grass: Relearning Relationships in an Age of Acceleration

You are cordially invited to a lecture by Salad Dressing Landscape

Touch-Starved Touch Grass: Relearning Relationships in an Age of Acceleration

Date: 8^th April 2026
Time: 6:00-7:30 pm
Venue: SDE4, Level 5 Forum, DOA, National University of Singapore, 8 Architecture Dr, Singapore 117564

During the early months of the pandemic, something subtle happened in cities around the world. Grass grew longer and roadside vegetation thickened. Small pockets of urban nature, briefly extricated from routine maintenance, began to shift. The notion of “rewilding” crept into our collective psyche, signalling a quiet change in how we think about other life around us.

This surfaced during a peculiar historical moment: isolation intensified, yet connection accelerated. Removed from familiar rhythms, we began asking quieter questions about where we, as individuals and as a species, stand in the wider web of life.

Landscapes sit at a strange intersection where worlds overlap. A garden or canopy walk may feel like a familiar human space. Yet, around us, plants signal through colour and chemistry. Each organism moves through its own sensory reality: its umwelt.

Another web surrounds us. Signals move everywhere: through water, soil, air, and fibre-optic cables. Science reveals that organisms are rarely singular beings but assemblages. The same forces that isolated us also hold power in connecting us.

Life begins to resemble a field of communication: dense, overlapping, restless. Landscapes become places where these entanglements comes into view and human perception catches a fleeting glimpse of the wider network in which it has always been embedded. If we see with eyes unclouded, we may just witness some of this wonder.

Speaker Bio

In 2002, Chang Huai-yan established the Singaporean-based landscape architecture practice Salad Dressing. Shaped by the post-anthropocentric forces and challenges currently facing humanity, Salad Dressing’s projects can be found across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, China and Dubai, notably the award-winning Singapore Pavilion (in collaboration with WOHA) at World Expo 2020, Enabling Village, and at Jurong Lake Gardens.

Goh Yu Han is the design director at Salad Dressing. She is a Malaysian-born landscape architect with a background in the arts. Yu Han’s design philosophy is driven by her intrinsic interest in art history and Eastern literature. As a polymath, her practice flirts with posthumanist ecology. She believes that any predominant inequality will constitute the main value change of an era: from slavery, to sexism, to the current ecological struggle against speciesism.