As an award-winning landscape architect and interdisciplinary designer based in Houston, USA, Xinyue Hope Shen is advancing a climate-responsive approach to landscape architecture that connects ecological planning, urban design, cultural narrative, and public experience. She is a Landscape Architect with SWA Group, an internationally recognized landscape architecture and urban design practice known for large-scale public-realm, hospitality, civic, and urban design projects, and has worked on civic landscapes, public parks, hospitality, and real estate projects in the United States, Mexico, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea. Xinyue has received awards from the National ASLA Awards, Texas ASLA Awards, IDA Design Awards and MUSE Design Awards. She believes that landscape is not decorative open space, but rather environmental infrastructure that rehabilitates ecosystems, fortifies climate resilience and reconnects communities with place.
ARCHITECTURE
Across hospitality landscapes, exhibition-based research, and climate-adaptive urban design, Xinyue’s practice is defined by a rare ability to connect environmental systems with cultural meaning. In her work on historic hotel landscapes in Egypt, including Mena House Giza, Old Cataract Aswan, and Winter Palace Luxor, Xinyue contributed design strategies that balance heritage preservation with contemporary hospitality experience. One key contribution was the development of landscape sequences that protect and frame historic views while improving guest comfort in hot, arid environments. She treats landscape not as decoration, but as a living framework where climate, memory, infrastructure, and public life meet. From historic hotel gardens to AI-era data centers and coastal wetlands, her work translates complex global challenges into spaces that are both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant.
Reframing Heritage Hospitality at Mena House Giza
At SWA Group, Xinyue Hope Shen’s work on the Mena House Giza Hotel Landscape places her practice within one of the world’s most iconic hospitality settings. As a five-star historic hotel located steps from the Pyramids of Giza, Mena House carries global visibility and deep cultural significance. Xinyue brings strong hospitality experience to the project, including work on Grand Hyatt Los Cabos in Mexico and multiple historic hotel landscapes in Egypt. Her approach balances preservation, atmosphere, and contemporary luxury, using landscape to frame the pyramids, improve microclimate comfort, and create a refined guest experience rooted in history and place. Currently under construction, the project presents landscape as an active part of renovation, shaping comfort, memory, and the guest experience.
As the lead designer and team leader for the Mena House Giza Hotel landscape, Xinyue was responsible for guiding the project’s landscape direction from concept development to construction documentation. She led the design team in shaping the landscape concept, spatial sequencing, planting character, shaded circulation, view-framing strategy, and detailed documentation. Her work focused on balancing refined guest experience with desert-climate comfort, heritage sensitivity, and carefully framed visual relationships to the pyramids. In this role, Xinyue not only contributed design ideas, but also coordinated the team’s creative and technical efforts to ensure that the landscape responded to the cultural significance, environmental conditions, and hospitality goals of the site.
The result is a landscape that does not compete but enhances the iconic presence of Giza. The project reflects Xinyue’s cross-cultural sensitivity and climate-responsive design judgment. Her contribution is to use landscape as a refined spatial instrument, not just a visual enhancement, that can preserve heritage, improve environmental comfort and transform hospitality design into a deeper cultural experience.
In parallel to her professional trajectory at SWA Group, Xinyue Hope Shen founded LYG Studio in Shanghai, an independent studio for design research, spatial education, and cross-disciplinary creative practice. Through LYG Studio, Xinyue has developed independent research projects recognized by international design awards and public exhibitions, including Beyond Concrete and Barcelona Three Chimneys.
Spatial Research Through Art and Exhibition
Xinyue’s independent work extends beyond conventional landscape practice into one of the most urgent spatial questions of the AI era: how can the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence coexist with the environment? Her project Beyond Concrete: The New Era of AI, a data center proposal for New York City, was recognized with two 2026 MUSE Design Gold Awards and exhibited during NYCxDESIGN. Rather than treating the data center as a sealed technical facility, Shen reimagines it as a civic and ecological landmark that makes the hidden systems of digital life visible.
The project responds to growing concerns around AI infrastructure, including energy consumption, heat production, land use, and environmental impact. Through architectural form, landscape integration, and environmental strategy, Beyond Concrete transforms the data center from an anonymous concrete box into a platform for public awareness and ecological imagination.
Xinyue’s approach centers on a landscape-based perspective. She does not view AI infrastructure as purely digital or mechanical, but as something connected to land, climate, energy, and urban life. By exploring cooling systems, heat reuse, landscape buffering, and public interface, the project suggests how future data centers could become more environmentally responsive, socially visible, and spatially meaningful.
Landscape as Environmental Infrastructure and Cultural Medium
Developed through LYG Studio as Shen’s independent research, Barcelona Three Chimneys Coastal Wetland Park rextends Xinyue Hope Shen’s exploration of environmental adaptability. Located at the mouth of the Besòs River, along Barcelona’s post-industrial coastline, the site is marked by three nearly 200-meter chimneys, powerful remnants of the city’s industrial past. Yet the site is also highly exposed. As sea levels rise, this low-lying coastal edge may face increasing risk of inundation in the near future.
For Xinyue, the project became a way to study how landscapes can adapt before environmental pressure becomes irreversible. Her proposal keeps the chimneys as anchors of memory, while reshaping the land into a coastal wetland system of tidal marshes, salt-tolerant planting, floodable ground, shaded gathering areas, and forested buffers. These landscapes are designed to hold water, reduce heat, restore habitat, and support more than 200 species that rely on this estuarine environment.
Xinyue makes environmental adaptation part of the public experience. The park becomes a place where people can walk, gather, learn, and witness ecological change. Its value lies in giving the coast a new future, one that protects the city, preserves industrial memory, and allows biodiversity and public life to grow together.
Together, these projects show that Xinyue’s influence extends beyond individual design outcomes. Her work has helped project teams, clients, designers, students, and public audiences reconsider what landscape architecture can do: preserve cultural heritage, make invisible infrastructure understandable, improve climate comfort, restore ecological systems, and transform vulnerable sites into meaningful public spaces. Her contributions are important because they provide not only visually refined design results, but also practical frameworks that other professionals can study, adapt, and apply in future landscape architecture, hospitality, infrastructure, and urban resilience projects.
Discover more of Xinyue Hope Shen’s projects on her portfolio page.
Words by DSCENE Editor Maya Lane.
