Yanghao Tian

Designer

Yanghao Tian graduated from UVa in December 2022, where he served as a Teaching Assistant for the Second-Year First-Semester Landscape Architecture Foundation Studio taught by CL Bohannon, Michael Luegering, and Rebecca Hinch. He approaches landscape design as a medium for embracing dynamism, indeterminacy, and entanglements between overlapped constructed and natural systems. Growing up on the Inner Mongolian Plateau, in Huhhot, China, Yanghao developed a strong curiosity about native species and the plateau’s prairie ecosystem. He credits his awareness of indeterminacy to the traditional cultural landscape practices of Mongolians that have shaped the region, such as the seasonal movements of herders. With an interest in building connections between people and land, he studied at Beijing Forestry University, where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture. He then worked at Tom Leader Studio and SWA Group in Shanghai from Summer 2020-2021, where he had the opportunity to engage in two Duisberg-Nord-like competition projects centered on transforming post-industrial steelwork sites into urban parks and arts districts. He continued excavating the cultural and ecological potentials of the site in the dense urban environment in his project-based experience working on the Hong Kong New Central Harbor Front with PWPLA in the Summer of 2022 and in his research and proposal for the transformation of West Bahnhof in Vienna with an inter-disciplinary team from UVa. In his spare time, Yanghao likes to visit art institutes, explore cities on foot and go hiking with friends.