Verbal Foliage

　　The best laid plans are also the worst laid plans... 　　depending on who’s talking about them 　　A French friend of mine – whose Chinese is excellent – has for the past year been cheerfully agreeing wh taxi drivers that French women are ‘romantic’. To her chagrin, she was not aware of the full implications of the word in Chinese. 　　Misunderstandings like this are as much about culture as they are about language. And they don’t just happen in Beijing’s taxis they can also happen in print. They can happen among learned university professors in high brow periodicals about everything from philosophy to gardening, to gardening philosophy. 　　Example: On July 11th, Peking University Professor, Kongjian Yu’s landscape architecture company Turenscape won two international prizes from the American Society of Lanscape Architects (ASLA). These were the ASLA Honor Award, Plannng and Analysis and ASLA Design Honor Award for, respectively, their work at Taizhou City and Shenyang Architectural University Rice Paddy Campus. Turenscape likes to employ what Yu calls ‘negative planning’. Imagine wahing a movie, and think of the principal actors and action as the buildings and major visible changes to the landscape ?the things everyone thinks of as planning. Yu likes to focus on the background – the negative – fst, to ensure there is a solid (and sustainable) base to work with. 　　Yu’s supporters admire his forward thinking, environmentally friendly approach. And within his field, the majority of them are based abroad. Yu’s detctors claim he’s too modern. Yu’s detractors claim he’s not Chinese enough. Most of Yu’s detractors are his Chinese contemporaries. In the last year alone, ten papers have criticized him for, among other things, his ance on modernism and science, often – as he readily admits – western science. The traditional element thin that the introduction of modernism (by which they mean westernism), detracts from the Chinese spirit of what he’s doing. 　　But is an environmentally friendly approach necessarily at odds with a traditional Chinese one? I mean, the man planted a field of rice at an agriculture university for Confucius sake. 　　So where’s the confuson? Well, Yu is a western educated landscape architect. In the US, landscape architecture has existed as a profession since 1886. In China, since December 2, 2004. Of course, the ‘old guard’ of China’s landscape architecture don’t actually exist. The experts who criticize Yu are indeed masters of their field, it just happens to be a completely different fiel namely landscape gardening. The criticism comes down to a load of landscape gardeners mouthing off about Yu for not being enough of a landscape gardener, which he claims not to be anyway. It must be the word ‘landscape’ that throws people off. 　　When Yu is criticized for applying scientific method and pre planning around a western model, it’s because no Chinese model exists, because the field he’s in up until a year ago – wasn’t even a field. Likely it had an old East German factory on it, or perhaps a concretoverland re-channeled river. 　　Perhaps Professor Yu is also criticized because he’s loud. And modern. And he’s proud of doing things differently, and he wants to talk about it. Peter Droege, by contrast, has been quietlyelping the Beijing government since 1985. Droege, the Chair for the World Council of Renewable Energy (Asia Pacific Region), is involved in an advisory role on spreading Beijing’s burgeoning sprawl into a series of satelite towns. Droege has, like Yu, made sustainable development his watchword. And he talks very positively about China’s potential for sustainable growth, speaking of a willingness here to embrace “traditional values”,t also of a world of “resource autonomy” and “renewable energy agriculture amidst a new and sustainably, purposefully technology-bound societ the kind of hybrid future perhaps only China can show the world.” Of cours, no one has thought to suggest that Droege is too modern, or not traditional enough. But he’s not Chinese. And he doesn’t have the word ‘landscape’ in his job title. [img]http://www.turenscape.com/upload/news/2005913211336564.jpg[/img]