Ying-Yu Hung

Ying-Yu Hung is Managing Principal of SWA Los Angeles and a studio professor at the University of Southern California. Her design studios explore the intersect between landscape urbanism and infrastructure in Downtown Los Angeles, focusing on the permeability between districts, infrastructural connectivity, open-space networks, and the residual, underutilized spaces such as parking lots, rooftops, alleyways, and freeway embankments.

At SWA, Hung created the Infrastructure Research Initiative to document, catalog and disseminate the latent ecological and recreational value of infrastructure in our cities and towns. By structuring this data with case studies from Los Angeles and around the world, Hung argues that the potential of landscape can be further explored if examined within the context of infrastructure and urbanism.

The realization that cities are primarily a heightened manifestation of what is traditionally known as landscape—defined by process, change, and renewal—has steered Hung’s career over the last fifteen years toward urban projects of various scales and complexities. As the recipient of multiple national and international awards for her designs and plans, and coauthor of an upcoming book by Birkhäuser/Actar, she has the vision and voice required to protect our exhaustible resources with sustainable development.

Gerdo Aquino

Gerdo Aquino, SWA’s president and an adjunct associate professor of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Southern California, is a leading advocate for efficient and multipurpose infrastructure. As an academic and practitioner, he seeks to promote landscape infrastructure through both research and large-scale commissioned projects. Aquino directs his USC design studios’ focus on the application of landscape infrastructure to resolve pressing urban challenges related to density, environmental degradation, health, and accessibility. He encourages his students to identify existing infrastructure opportunities, consult with civic leaders, and develop rehabilitation plans that seek to achieve more integrated solutions. In his academic mentoring role, Aquino aims to provoke new thinking in the field, and empower the next generation of landscape architects to optimally shape and program future infrastructure investments. His students’ work has received national recognition for their innovative investigations into this field of study. As SWA’s president and co-managing principal of the Los Angeles office, Aquino’s multifunctional design approach to landscape infrastructure has resulted in exemplary ASLA-award-winning projects. He’s also the coauthor of an the book Landscape Infrastructure, forthcoming from Birkhäuser/Actar.

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