Linda Zhang

Planting Imagination (2022)

Location: Everywhere on the Hypercity App

“Planting Imagination” asks: How can Augmented Reality (AR) be used to better equip the Chinatown community to steward the future of the built environment?

Making use of AR’s ability to visualize multiple designs in real time and real space, “Planting Imagination” offers a toolkit for community co-design and co-imagatinon of Cecil Community Centre’s back garden and its future. This AR installation part of Hypercity presents both the process and the outcome of a two-year community co-design project. We invite you to explore this co-design project through AR design iterations of the ever-evolving Cecil Community Centre Garden in Toronto’s Chinatown West!   

On Sunday March 5th from 2-4PM, we invite you to share space at Cecil Community Centre (25 Cecil St.) and co-imagine with artists, Chinatown community members and the Cecil Community Centre team. Together, we will eat good food, play mahjong, and have a facilitated conversation with the Centre’s garden committee.

Linda Zhang is a registered architect, interior designer and co-founding principal at Studio Pararaum (Toronto—Zürich). Zhang's design-research proposes the process of making as a form of cognition; production as thought—thinking always translates into making and making into further ideas. Through this process, her work explores how community memory, cultural heritage, and identity can be embodied through emergent technologies (including VR, AR, machine learning, robotics and 3D scanning), lived experience (affect theory), matter (ceramics), and material processes (slip casting). She is a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the EKWC (European Ceramic Work Centre), 2022 Toronto Metropolitan University Library Research-in-Residence and 2021-2022 visiting scholar at NYU’s A/P/A Institute.

Her work has been exhibited and presented internationally in Canada, China, Germany, Korea, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, including the London Festival of Architecture, Milan Architecture Design Expo, The Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Toronto Offsite Design Festival and the Canadian Centre of Architecture. She was a Dean’s Merit Scholar at Harvard University GSD where she received a MArch I AP with distinction, the James Templeton Kelley Thesis Prize and the AIA Henry Adams Certificate. She completed her BScArch with honours at McGill University Peter Guo-hua Fu SOA where she was the recipient of McGill Alumnae 75th Anniversary Scholarship, the Faculty of Engineering Scholarship, the Murdoch Laing Design Competition (third prize), the Philip J. Turner Prize, and the Steel Structure Education Foundation Scholarship.