What Kills the Cat? - The Seven Curiosities of Landscape Architecture and the Collective Unconscious of Landscape

You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Long Seen Hui:

Date: Tuesday, August 20th 2024

Time: 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT427

What Kills the Cat? – The Seven Curiosities of Landscape Architecture and the Collective Unconscious of Landscape

This talk invites all onto an investigative journey to uncover what kills the cat, the beloved pet of the landscape student. It introduces the seven landscape curiosities as prime suspects and along this voyage of discovery into the psyche of the landscape student (both in as well as no-longer-in school), lay bare piece by piece our Collective Unconscious of Landscape.

Psychological and/or behavioural responses to the landscape can be innate, embedded by evolutionary selection processes that favour the phenotypes into the surviving genes. Understanding the mechanics of spatial experience and how visual, conceptual learning and spatial memories share an internal mapping system in the brain, this work deliberated on the agents that potentially elicit innate landscape responses from humans. It argues the case for a collective unconscious of landscape that embodies landscape biological and cultural histories. Empirical study of the biological history is possible through the investigation of its interaction with cultural history and vice versa as manifested in landscape memes.

Where currently the most popular narrative exists for a savannah-like (park) landscape typology, more nuanced and detailed information can better inform space engineering in landscape design and urbanism in the increasingly complex and tight urban environment. It is a call-to-action for the landscape student’s involvement in more interdisciplinary research in landscape psychology and behaviour. These findings will have invaluable insights that can better inform and advance the art and science of planning and designing for resilient liveable spaces in our cities.

Seen Hui has been a practicing landscape architect since 1994. Starting as a planner/designer at Parks and Recreation Department, he became design lead at the National Parks Board until his departure to the private sector.

His most recently completed projects include Mandai Wildlife West, Bird Paradise, 15 Holland Hill and MeyerHouse as well as Parkroyal Marina Bay. Tampines Ave 11, Watten House, Pinetree Hill, Bukit Batok Nature Corridor, Farrer Park Integrated Development, Lim Chu Kang Masterplan, Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment are some of many on-going projects. As a design thinker and a thinking designer, he believes in the theory of practice and the practice of theory.

He designed and developed design thinking and problem-solving training programmes, successfully marketing these and achieving over 98% closing rate with more than 50 MNC and public sector clients such as Keppel Ltd, ST Engineering, Singapore Police Force etc.  Walking the talk, he continues to deliver landscape design with a deep understanding of what keeps his clients awake at night, nurturing design empathy through user and client engagement, field observation and critical insights.

Seen Hui’s current research interest lies in the collective unconscious of landscape and how landscape memes can potentially be an archaeological source for the understanding of this collective unconscious. He believes in uncovering these for the purpose of contributing to evidence-based design of our urban/natural environment for building livable resilient cities.