The Rainbow of Renewal, a landscape project co-designed by Chen Yang, has received a 2026 Red Dot Design Award. The 2026 Design Concept winners were announced in August, and the awards were presented on 15 October at the Capitol Theatre in Singapore, an evening that also opened the winners’ exhibition at the Red Dot Design Museum Singapore. Conceived for a former nuclear test site, the project proposes a circular water installation designed to create rainbows through mist and sunlight, giving the land’s history a visible expression through a natural image that also evokes ecological renewal and resilience.
Two other projects by Yang were presented earlier this year. Migrate The City, an architectural project near New York’s Penn Station, received recognition from the DNA Paris Design Awards and appeared in Feel Before Meaning, a group exhibition in Brooklyn, New York. The Flatland Horse was presented at the Seattle Design Festival, where it was selected for the Installations program, received a Funding Award, and was open to the public at Lake Union Park.
Across his projects, Yang has explored how a site’s history and social context can inform spaces that people can experience, use and engage with. In Migrate The City, an architectural project for which he led the design, a transit hub near New York’s Penn Station incorporates public services, shared spaces and community support to address the needs people face after arriving in a city. In The Flatland Horse, an interactive installation he helped design, the horse from an equestrian monument becomes a public space that visitors can walk through, touch and use, engaging with the work through physical activity.
The award-winning Rainbow of Renewal brings that exploration to landscape design at a historic site. The project uses a rainbow as an act of remembrance, bringing the memory of nuclear testing and the promise of renewal into the same landscape. In this collaborative work, Yang helps bring history into the present-day experience of space by changing how people perceive the site. A former test site is also, in land terms, the kind of ground a city or an agency is left holding: used up, fenced off, and difficult to return to public use. Flora Lee, an associate partner at MAD Architects and a guest juror for Buildner, described the idea as “innovative.” She noted that the mist recalls the explosive gas of nuclear bombs, yet produces a rainbow. “It seems as if the design is turning the painful into the hopeful,” Lee said.
In Migrate The City, Yang’s attention to place and people centers on urban life “after arrival.” For the project, located near Penn Station, he established the core spatial framework connecting transportation, public services, shared spaces and community support. How people gain access to a city’s resources through a transit hub, and how they become part of a community, became the starting points for his organization of the building’s functions.
What sets the proposal apart is that migration is handled as a spatial problem rather than as a theme. Questions about how newcomers find support and enter community life became part of the spatial layout, allowing a social issue to inform the organization of the building. The placement of public services and shared spaces, and the connections between them, address the needs associated with migration. A transit hub is normally measured by how efficiently people pass through it; this proposal is organized around what they need once they stop.
Reworking the established relationship between people and their surroundings also runs through The Flatland Horse. Drawing on the horse in an equestrian monument, the installation transforms a figure usually serving as the mount of a hero or military leader into a space people can enter and touch. Yang contributed to the design of the installation’s scale, spatial structure, visitor circulation and forms of interaction, focusing on the relationship between its structural form and public use.
From a transit hub to the imagery of a monument, both projects begin with familiar urban spaces and rethink how people relate to them. In Migrate The City, connections among functions create the spatial conditions for newcomers to build relationships with a community. The Flatland Horse turns viewing into participation, with movement, touch and lingering directly shaping the experience of the work. Yang’s design work thus extends from the organization of functions to the physical encounter between people and structures.
These changes take shape in specific structural choices. Migrate The City uses bent A-frame elements to expand the usable interior and improve daylight, while modular spaces accommodate different needs. Charred wood shingles, cross-laminated timber panels, glass and a steel structure form the architectural system, with spatial capacity, light and adaptability supporting its community service functions. Materials and structure give physical form to the core framework Yang developed.
In The Flatland Horse, structure also guides participation. CNC-cut plywood combines the outline of a horse with abstract geometric forms. Gate Horse creates a walk-through archway, reframing views of the city through its negative space; Slide Horse brings a slide and tactile materials into the space at ground level. As a member of the Studio Deng design team, Yang contributed to scale and circulation decisions that had to connect these forms with the ways people would actually use them.
Human experience helps determine the organization of space from the outset, rather than being added after a form is complete. In the architectural framework Yang led, users’ needs determine how functions connect. In the public installation he helped design, human activity informs scale and structure. In the award-winning landscape concept, a rainbow brings the site’s history into viewers’ visual experience. The continuity across the three projects lies in this process of turning questions rooted in a site into design decisions.
Yang has applied the same interest in disused land to projects in the United States. The River Commons turns a Denver brownfield into affordable housing; it received a 2025 International Design Awards Bronze and was shortlisted in the AIA Denver Affordable Housing Challenge. REOCCUPATION: PROTOTYPE, which reoccupies vacant space in Jackson Heights, Queens, received a 2026 MUSE Gold award.
With the Red Dot award for The Rainbow of Renewal, a distinct approach emerges across Yang’s landscape, architectural and public installation work: allowing a site’s history and social relationships to shape the organization of space, then using function, structure and perception to establish tangible connections between people and their surroundings. It is not a visual style but a method, and it shows up in individual design choices: the needs a space accommodates, the forms of participation it opens to the public, and how those choices change people’s experience of a place — work he is continuing on underused land and buildings in American cities.
