Yadan Luo

B.A. in Environmental Art Design, Jiangnan University (2007)

M.L.A. University of Pennsylvania (2015)

Yadan Luo is a landscape architect, educator, and researcher whose work connects public-realm design, community engagement, and the transformation of transportation infrastructure. He is Co-founder and Creative Director of YH LAB, a Philadelphia-based landscape architecture and urban design practice, and serves as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture and Associate Director of the Future Cities Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

With more than a decade of professional experience in the United States and China, Yadan has worked at OLIN, LandDesign, and Turenscape, contributing to projects ranging from urban districts and waterfront parks to corporate campuses and cultural landscapes. His experience includes Pier 26 at Hudson River Park and its Science Playground in New York, Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station District Planning, Google Bay View Campus, and Microsoft Campus Modernization. Through YH LAB, he brings this experience to public projects that strengthen community identity, ecological performance, and everyday public life. His work on the Philadelphia Chinatown Stitch, including community-based public-space pilots and modular market stalls, connects neighborhood-scale interventions with broader questions of infrastructure, cultural continuity, and urban connectivity.

Yadan’s research agenda, Latent Landscape, investigates the overlooked social, ecological, and temporal capacities of transportation infrastructure. He explores how streets and legacy transportation corridors can evolve into adaptive civic infrastructure—landscapes that respond to changing community needs while supporting mobility, public life, and environmental resilience. Building on his autonomous urbanism research initiated in 2018, his Flexible Street research examines where, when, and how streets can accommodate different uses over time. His approach connects mapping and analysis with community engagement, prototyping, and real-world evaluation, while investigating the operational and institutional conditions needed to translate design experiments into lasting change.

At Penn, Yadan has taught across the landscape architecture curriculum, including LARP 5010 Studio I, LARP 5020 Design Studio II: Park Design, and LARP 6020 Studio IV: Urban Design, LARP Media I courses, and summer institutes. Also, his seminar Designing Play explores play as a medium for communication, community engagement, and collaborative design, connecting students with local partners to develop and test ideas in real settings.

Shaped by practicing, researching, teaching, and living in both the United States and China, Yadan approaches landscape architecture as a means of connecting ecological systems, cultural identities, and everyday experience. Across his work, he seeks to reveal possibilities within existing places and translate them into public landscapes that are more adaptable, inclusive, and responsive to the communities they serve.