Planting a seed

"Our team began with questioning the idea of why bamboo has to start from the ground and grow upward. So we flipped it upside down and made it falling bamboo," she says, adding that she hopes the design entertains visitors as they interact with it by hitting the bamboo to create music.

Judges of the contest came from a number of countries, such as China, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Dirk Sijmons, one of the judges, who's also former chair and professor of landscape architecture at Delft University of Technology, says he saw the students' enormous creativity.

"The way everyone made use of the specific qualities of the bamboo is fantastic. The 15 portfolios are really different from each other. Each has a concept and worked to that concept," Sijmons says.

The event offers opportunities for landscape architecture majors like Chen Yumeng, a senior from Tongji University in Shanghai, to create physical designs.

Chen's team built a cubic bamboo box with hanging flowers in its central space.

Chen says it was their first time actually constructing one of their designs. And, perhaps most importantly, they better understood the gap between creating a concept and the practical realities of building it.

"The biggest problem was how to stably fix the whole thing to the ground," she says.

"At first, we planned to use bolts, which turned out to be too short to punch through the bamboo. So we had to use belts made of plastic, iron and hemp rope."

She explains that the length, width and curvature of the bamboo in reality is not as consistent as when using computer-modeling software, which posed more challenges for the team during construction.