Designing Through Connection | Siyu Gao Shares Her Perspective

This recognition is very meaningful to me. It gives me confidence that a speculative and ecological project can still speak to real concerns. It also encourages me to continue exploring architecture as a hybrid practice. 

This achievement has helped me better understand and present my own design language. It not only enriched my portfolio but also gave me more confidence as an early-career designer.

When I revisited and redrew the project, I had the opportunity to reflect on my original design concept again. I was also able to bring in new thoughts and experiences, making the project feel complete and more coherent.

Experimentation is essential to my process. I usually do not begin with a fixed form. I begin by testing relationships between water, plants, structure, circulation, and people.

In a Self-Sustaining Micro Ecological Island, the conservatories were not designed only as greenhouses. Through experimentation, they became hybrid structures: botanical spaces, water systems, public landmarks, and ecological machines at the same time.

One unusual source of inspiration was the film Annihilation. I was fascinated by its genetic fusion, slightly eerie, but also strangely beautiful. It helped me think about nature as something fluid, adaptive, and transformative. This inspired me to see architecture not as a fixed object, but as a hybrid living system 

I wish more people understood that design is not a straight path. It is a process of searching, testing, failing, adjusting, and discovering. A strong project often comes from patiently connecting many layers. 

I try to understand the deeper goal behind each expectation. A request is usually not only about function; it may also be about experience, identity, comfort, or long-term value. For me, staying true to an idea does not mean ignoring constraints. It means transforming constraints into part of the design logic.

The main challenge was making the project feel both visionary and believable. It imagines a future ecological island, but it also needed to respond to real site conditions, water systems, public access, and coastal resilience.

I addressed this by designing the island as a phased system that grows over time. Instead of one finished object, it becomes a long-term ecological framework.

Whenever I encounter a creative block, I often step outside the framework of architecture and look at films, natural systems, biological patterns, textures, or scientific images.

Knowledge from different fields allows me to view my work from another perspective. I like to imagine myself as a plant growing through the gaps of architecture, or as a bird flying over it. I also try to create cinematic background stories for my projects, so the architecture can carry not only form and function, but also atmosphere, emotion, and imagination.

I value beauty, but not only as appearance. For me, beauty comes from meaningful relationship when ecology, structure, memory, technology, and human experience begin to interweave naturally.

Stay curious, excited and build your own way of seeing. Do not only chase style. Try to understand why something moves you, why a place feels powerful, or why a system works. Your unique interests and experiences can become your strongest design language.

I would love to collaborate with Syd Mead. I admire how his work combines film, architecture, industrial design, and speculative imagination. His projects create entire worlds, not just isolated objects.

I am fascinated by this kind of hybrid thinking. I am interested in how different systems can merge and generate something unfamiliar but meaningful. In my own work, I hope architecture can become a living framework where ecology, technology, material, and human experience interweave.

I wish people would ask about the iconic quality of my architecture. In many of my projects, I imagine a core design language that can evolve across different scales: XS, M, and XL.

At the XS scale, it could become an object such as a planter, a lamp, or another small product with its own character. At the M scale, it could become an off-grid modular space, the smallest inhabitable unit that can exist independently. At the XL scale, it could expand into an architectural and cinematic world-building system.

For me, an architectural icon is not only a single image or form. It is a design language that can transform, migrate, and grow across scales while still carrying the same identity.