Hongjin Li

About

Hongjin Li is an environmental architect from Changchun, China, with a background in art, architecture, and urban design. Her exceptional interdisciplinary skills have led to the publication of four research papers on remote sensing and environmental-ecological climate adaptation in prestigious international journals. Her deep interest in politics, law, science, religious theology, and aesthetics imbues her logic with a multidimensional, egalitarian approach and the ability to create media between reality and broad and intangible conflicts.

At the Royal College of Art, her project set in the UNESCO Sitia Geopark in Crete, Greece, specialises in meteorological architecture and its environmental reflection across multiple scales. As the number of wind turbines and associated facilities increases each year, the turbulence the wind turbines create, coupled with the water vapor from the island’s climate, form unique patterns of the water cycle and atmospheric circulation in this space, resulting in a unique meteorological architecture – ‘Turbine Clouds’, thus the environment within the Geopark is restructuring, affects habitats for EU-protected birds, archaeological sites, agriculture, vegetation, etc.

Leveraging clouds as a dynamic environmental representation, taking UNESCO Sitia Geopark’s involvement in energy-related court cases as a clue, she suggests that clouds could be incorporated as a factor in active environmental assessment in the context of island geography to shed light on the ecological changes that occur as a result of atmospheric shifts caused by turbulence in energy infrastructure. In close contact with Geopark officials, lawyers, ornithologists, and local academics, she combines fieldwork with existing spatial policies to visualise and cartography of weather systems, energy infrastructure, archaeological sites, and bird sanctuaries in support of the tribunal.

Her cloud-based experiments across media and scales within the local heritage context aim to constructively challenge the boundaries of stewardship, cognitive biases, conflicting energy transitions and de-growth, and the coexistence of diverse life forms. Her thesis, ‘Turbine Clouds: Restructuring Microclimates and Life’ and sculpture, ‘Cloud Paracosm’, incorporate mythological references from traditional Greek folklore and cutting-edge atmospheric science to narrate the relationship between wind turbines and cloud formation and reorganisation in the Sitia region. Clouds are framed as physical entities to understand the microclimate under cloud variability and its impact on living and non-living elements from a cosmological perspective.