Ice Garden
Ice Garden is a temporary installation located at the foot of the ancient Great Wall, adjacent to a major hiking trail and some smaller mountain paths. The project draws on the temperatures and dry climate, allowing ice to emerge as an architectural material shaped directly by natural forces. The installation is composed of a series of ice walls extending along the forest slope. Instead of imposing a fixed geometry, the layout follows the existing distribution of trees, allowing denser areas to become moments of enclosure, while more open clearings naturally form passages through the forest. Through this process, an underlying spatial order of the forest becomes legible. At a larger scale, the Great Wall at Jinshanling extends through the mountains as a continuous edge. The ice walls echo this continuity through a temporary, season-specific material presence. Construction is carried out through a collaboration between human action and natural processes. Agricultural fleece membranes are suspended and sprayed with water. As the water freezes layer by layer, thin ice shells gradually form on both sides of the fleece. The semi-transparent ice walls acquire a brief yet distinct architectural presence. The walls unfold sinuously among the trees and creating spatial conditions that hover between the natural and the interior. As sunlight slants through the ice, shadows of trees and visitors overlap and blur. Light passing through layers of ice and branches gently compresses the forest beyond into a softened background, subtly bending depth and distance. Through this slight intervention, movement through the site shifts from a casual passage across the terrain to a renewed reading of the landscape. What was once taken for granted becomes perceptible again: the spacing of trees, the changing light, and the quiet presence of the forest itself. The forest appears momentarily frozen, allowing an unfamiliar yet site-attuned spatial sensibility to emerge. In the winter landscape of Jinshanling, Ice Garden employs the lightest of materials, allowing space to be formed, and unformed, by natural forces. Ice Garden does not seek permanence. Its architecture exists only for as long as the weather allows. As temperatures rise, direct solar exposure and strong air currents accelerate sublimation; the walls begin to crack with faint, audible sounds of splitting. They slowly melt and collapse, returning water to the ground and leaving the site unchanged. In this sense, the project embraces the fleeting nature of ice itself—allowing space to briefly emerge, and then dissolve back into the landscape.
