EARTHSEED DOME

Artist Lily Kwong


Transamerica Redwood Park, San Francisco

Groundbreaking Ceremony: January 17, 2026

“EARTHSEED DOME is a homecoming for me - a chance to honor the redwoods that shaped my mission and imagination growing up in the Bay Area. Bringing this earthwork into dialogue with San Francisco’s living ecology and cultural iconography is a true joy. My hope is this piece helps weave people back into our roots – into the ecology, memory and possibilities for a regenerative future for this great city. It’s an invitation to participate, to belong, and to be good stewards to the earth.”

Lily Kwong

We are pleased to announce the launch of a site-responsive public art project–EARTHSEED DOME by Lily Kwong–at the Transamerica Pyramid Center and its adjacent Transamerica Redwood Park. The project will transform the urban park space using 3D-printed living soil to create an overarching dome, creating a distinctive sculpture that doubles as a seed dispersal hub to help restore urban ecology.

The Institute of Contemporary Art-San Francisco is producing and presenting Earthseed Dome with Art at a Time Like This creating additional programming. The project is made possible, in part, thanks to a donation of $50,000 from the Svane Family Foundation’s Culture Forward Initiative to Art at a Time Like This on behalf of Lily Kwong.

EARTHSEED DOME is a large-scale living earthwork reimagining Buckminster Fuller’s iconic geodesic dome through the lens of traditional knowledge and earthen architecture. Where Fuller envisioned the dome as a beacon of modernity and technological possibility, EARTHSEED DOME roots that vision in soil, ancestral building techniques, and the living systems that sustain us. The piece is completely responsive to its backdrop of the Transamerica Pyramid, with both structures meant to symbolize organic harmony between architecture, nature and urban life. Though the Pyramid exemplifies an ascent of human ambition and progress, the Dome inverts that gesture, grounding energy back into the earth. Both structures engage with light, geometry and metaphysical symbolism.

Drawing on ancient technologies such as adobe construction, rammed earth, and seed stewardship, the project merges time-honored craft with emerging methods like 3D printing using seed-impregnated soil. “Earthseed” references Octavia Butler’s philosophy in her Parable series (“God is Change”) and suggests a mode of architecture rooted in ecology, transformation, adaptability and earth-centered thinking. EARTHSEED DOME places seeds in a cultural or relational protocol - where they are intertwined with stories, prayers and care that acknowledge their agency and place in ancestral cosmologies. Through this lens, seed dispersal is not merely a technical or agricultural practice, but a deeply social, ecological and political act.

About Lily Kwong

Lily Kwong is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores plant life as both an artistic medium and a platform for community building and collective care. Informed by her background in urban studies, horticulture and sustainable design, Kwong’s practice seeks to reestablish a social awareness of the landscape as both a repository of ancestral knowledge and wellspring of future innovation. A testament to her belief in public engagement and communal exchange, each of her landscape projects are conceived to be multi-functional, as spaces for individual contemplation and as sites for community programming and education.

Recent projects include Gardens of Renewal, Madison Square Park, New York, NY (2025); Solis, Night Gallery, Los Angles, CA (2024); Subterrestrial, Night Gallery, Los Angles, CA (2024); The Orchid Show: Natural Heritage, New York Botanical Garden, New York, NY (2023) and the Summer Solstice botanical art installation for St.Germain, The High Line, New York, NY (2017). Gardens of Renewal and Natural Heritage each broke attendance records at their respective institutions.

ATLT previously worked with Kwong at Expo Chicago in 2023, where the artist built a forest from plants that regenerate after fires. Likewise, EARTHSEED DOME provides a moment of hope for a city where fires are an increasingly dangerous possibility. Through public workshops and native seed distribution, visitors and commuters will be engaged as pollinators, transforming the park and surrounding downtown into a participatory ecological corridor that fosters dialogue around sustainability and community care.

Institute of Contemporary Art SF x San Francisco Art Week
Kick Off Party | Special Event

Programming Partner Art at a Time Like This in collaboration with Lily Kwongʼs EARTHSEED DOME

Radial Ritual, choreographed by Madeline Hollander Saturday, January 17th, 2026
Performances at 6:30, 7:30 & 8:30pm in Transamerica Redwood Park

Acclaimed choreographer and artist Madeline Hollander presents Radial Ritual, a site-specific performance featuring six dancers that celebrates the inception of Lily Kwongʼs EARTHSEED DOME. The choreography draws inspiration from multiple scales: the rhythmic mechanistic movements of the 3D printing arm, the motions of germination as redwood seeds unfold their roots, as well as traditional agricultural folk dances. Through its cyclical repetition, the performance becomes a ritual that connects ancient technologies with the new and reveals the synergies made possible by this interplay of material, form, and community action.