Kongjian Yu: Fighting the Emperor’s Playground
[I]In a wide-ranging discussion, the landscape architect details how Chinese decision makers and Western architects are unwittingly collaborating to drain the country’s resources in the march toward urbanization[/I]
[center][IMG]http://www.landscape.cn/Upload/news/20061013175427448.jpg[/IMG]
Kongjian Yu, International ASLA, addresses the 200 ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO and 43rd IFLA World Congress. [/center]
The following is a partial transcript of LAND Online’s interview with Kongjian Yu, International ASLA. [URL=http://www.asla.org/land/audiovideo/yuaudio.html]Click here to listen to the full audio of the interview[/URL]. Highlights of Yu’s presentation to the 2006 ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO and 43rd IFLA World Congress are [URL=http://www.asla.org/land/audiovideo/yu.html]also available online by clicking here.[/URL]
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powered by ODEO[/center] The following is a partial transcript of LAND Online’s interview with Kongjian Yu, International ASLA. Click here to listen to the full audio of the interview. Highlights of Yu’s presentation to the 2006 ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO and 43rd IFLA World Congress are also available online by clicking here. [B]I have read accounts that say the rampant development in China has created a landscape where many of the cities simply begin to look the same. Do you think this is a fair statement, and do you think it results from a lack of professional designers in the country, or is growth happening so fast that speed and efficiency are trumping design? [/B] This question is very complicated. First, I agree that our cities are now becoming the same. Why? Because we neglected the natural environment, we neglected the cultural heritage, and we destroyed too much. We destroyed the everyday living structures, even people’s houses. Things have not been designated as historical sites, and they are all gone; they have all been destroyed. Millions of square meters have been destroyed in every city. And it is the natural landscape and the cultural heritage that make a city different from others. So, when we wiped out all of this cultural heritage and these vernacular landscapes, and when we didn’t respect the natural landforms, the natural water systems, the natural vegetation, the whole city became man-made with no meaning or form. Sometimes it looks like you’ve just dumped an American city in the middle of China. In Shanghai, there are nine satellite towns, and in each town they want to build a town from nine countries—one from the Netherlands, one from Germany, one from South America, and so forth—so we just don’t respect the land or the heritage of the site or the people who are going to live here. So we totally lose the connection between the land and the people—between history and today’s development. And that’s why we lose our cultural identity. Why has this happened? First, because China has been locked off for so long that when it finally opened in the 1980s, all the mayors and professionals went to see American cities, to see European cities, to see Versailles, to see Paris, and Berlin, and they thought, “That’s beautiful, that’s magnificent.” So that’s why they think, “Now we want to build like Americans, like Berlin, like Paris.” That’s the mentality. We don’t know the form of a good city and what is a livable city for China. Also, the system for decisions allows the mayor to select what he wants. The mayor makes the decisions, the mayor makes the planning—not a designer or an urban planner. And they say they like the cities this way. The third reason is about the profession itself. China has been closed for so many years, and modernism—the concept and theory—and the mistakes, the trials, and the errors of the Western world did not come to us. The textbooks are so old that we still talk about Versailles, St. Peters Plaza, and the baroque landscapes. The professional education badly needs to be advanced. That’s why the professional field is very weak in the face of the powerful mayors. We have a low voice. Now, we try to go to the West for help. Now we get so many architects from America, from European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands. We get Koolhaas and Herzog. We get CCTV headquarters, the grand opera house, and the bird’s nest—they’re all designed by Westerners. OK, they are beautiful architecture, they are beautiful landscapes, but the client wants them because they are gigantic. They cost so much money, they consume so much steel and concrete, and for what? Just for show. Now, this is not the designers’ problem. I cannot blame the architects. [B]But are they taking advantage?[/B] Yes, they are taking advantage of the client. The client wants the most beautiful, the biggest buildings in the world. That’s the client’s mentality, and the designers are just feeding the clients with all of these tempting beauties. [B]When you showed the image of the Beijing National Stadium, that’s where it hits home. You see the drawings and it’s striking. But when you see it in real life, and you consider how much goes into it, it’s like the architect is using your country as a playground?[/B] That’s it exactly. You remember the image I took from Koolhaas’s new book. He is actually teasing about playing with these buildings. These kinds of buildings have never been built. China has become a testing ground for these types of buildings, and the images are so attractive that the Chinese client is drawn to them. But the reality is totally different—it’s a maintenance problem, the high cost of construction, and we will hardly use it. So all of these problems become a burden for the Chinese client. [B]Your firm is called Turenscape, and I understand that “turen” roughly translates to “country bumpkin” or “redneck” in American English. First, is that true, and second, why did you pick this as your firm name?[/B] There are many meanings. First of all, “turen” is two characters in Chinese: “Tu” means earth, the land, and “ren” means people. So it’s really a combination of the land and the people. And that’s what I am going to deal with—the land and the people. The second meaning is because when I went back to China in 1997 from the States, many people expected me to choose a fancy American name, and that’s what many people do. Many people will choose a name like ABC, or CDE, or something like that. I deliberately chose my name to signal that my company is native, it’s local people, because native means you know the land and the people. You know more than anyone else about your own land and your own relationship with the land. [B]I read an article in Time Asia, where you say that China needs to “develop a new system, a new vernacular, to express the changing relationship between land and people.” How would you like to see that new vernacular defined?[/B] When we talk about “vernacular” people always think of “traditional”; they think of traditional Chinese gardens, the traditional way Chinese people live. But that’s past, that’s gone. Today I talked about the classical Chinese garden, which is not vernacular. It was developed for the emperors, as the emperors’ playground. And the real vernacular today is being destroyed by urbanization. We cannot go back to the old vernacular. We cannot go back to the traditional vernacular, because we are being urbanized. With 1.3 billion people being moved to the city, we need another way of dealing with the relationship between the land and the people. What I mean by vernacular is the authentic relationship between the land and people, which means we must build for the contemporary people, for the modern people, and based on modern technology, living style, and a modern understanding of the environment. Based on this new situation, we have to build a new relationship with the land, which means we’re not going to go back to the nostalgic past—the land of peach blossoms. It’s naive to try to go back there. And we certainly cannot go to this beautification model, which is also artificial, and is an extension of the classical gardening approach. Right now there is no authentic relationship between the city and the land, between the new world community and the land, and between the streams and the rivers and the cities. We totally ignore that. That’s why we have to follow the third road, which is to find an authentic relationship between land and people, and that’s the new vernacular. It will be for the common people, not for the mayors, and from the land, not from America or from Europe. From China’s land for Chinese people at this time—that’s the new vernacular. [B]That article also noted an approach to landscape architecture you call “anti-planning.” Can you explain that philosophy?[/B] Anti-planning is what I would say is negative planning, because in planning, you usually want to build something. In China for the past 20 years we always plan to build something, we plan the infrastructure, we plan the city, we promote the urbanization process, we invite outside people to move into the city—that’s positive planning. Now, in this process we totally forget the land. We totally forget that the land has its own living systems. Now, negative planning, or anti-planning, means that we have to build this landscape or living system first. It’s an unbuildable land system, and we have to plan this first. So it’s a negative process—like photo images, you have negative and positive. Instead of trying to just build cities, we have to protect the unbuildable area first, so we use minimal land and minimal ecological infrastructure to allow maximum urban development—not the other way around. This is landscape leading the way of urban development, which is not the way it’s been in the past—not in China, at least. Related Link http://www.asla.org/land/2006/1017/yu.html
powered by ODEO[/center] The following is a partial transcript of LAND Online’s interview with Kongjian Yu, International ASLA. Click here to listen to the full audio of the interview. Highlights of Yu’s presentation to the 2006 ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO and 43rd IFLA World Congress are also available online by clicking here. [B]I have read accounts that say the rampant development in China has created a landscape where many of the cities simply begin to look the same. Do you think this is a fair statement, and do you think it results from a lack of professional designers in the country, or is growth happening so fast that speed and efficiency are trumping design? [/B] This question is very complicated. First, I agree that our cities are now becoming the same. Why? Because we neglected the natural environment, we neglected the cultural heritage, and we destroyed too much. We destroyed the everyday living structures, even people’s houses. Things have not been designated as historical sites, and they are all gone; they have all been destroyed. Millions of square meters have been destroyed in every city. And it is the natural landscape and the cultural heritage that make a city different from others. So, when we wiped out all of this cultural heritage and these vernacular landscapes, and when we didn’t respect the natural landforms, the natural water systems, the natural vegetation, the whole city became man-made with no meaning or form. Sometimes it looks like you’ve just dumped an American city in the middle of China. In Shanghai, there are nine satellite towns, and in each town they want to build a town from nine countries—one from the Netherlands, one from Germany, one from South America, and so forth—so we just don’t respect the land or the heritage of the site or the people who are going to live here. So we totally lose the connection between the land and the people—between history and today’s development. And that’s why we lose our cultural identity. Why has this happened? First, because China has been locked off for so long that when it finally opened in the 1980s, all the mayors and professionals went to see American cities, to see European cities, to see Versailles, to see Paris, and Berlin, and they thought, “That’s beautiful, that’s magnificent.” So that’s why they think, “Now we want to build like Americans, like Berlin, like Paris.” That’s the mentality. We don’t know the form of a good city and what is a livable city for China. Also, the system for decisions allows the mayor to select what he wants. The mayor makes the decisions, the mayor makes the planning—not a designer or an urban planner. And they say they like the cities this way. The third reason is about the profession itself. China has been closed for so many years, and modernism—the concept and theory—and the mistakes, the trials, and the errors of the Western world did not come to us. The textbooks are so old that we still talk about Versailles, St. Peters Plaza, and the baroque landscapes. The professional education badly needs to be advanced. That’s why the professional field is very weak in the face of the powerful mayors. We have a low voice. Now, we try to go to the West for help. Now we get so many architects from America, from European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands. We get Koolhaas and Herzog. We get CCTV headquarters, the grand opera house, and the bird’s nest—they’re all designed by Westerners. OK, they are beautiful architecture, they are beautiful landscapes, but the client wants them because they are gigantic. They cost so much money, they consume so much steel and concrete, and for what? Just for show. Now, this is not the designers’ problem. I cannot blame the architects. [B]But are they taking advantage?[/B] Yes, they are taking advantage of the client. The client wants the most beautiful, the biggest buildings in the world. That’s the client’s mentality, and the designers are just feeding the clients with all of these tempting beauties. [B]When you showed the image of the Beijing National Stadium, that’s where it hits home. You see the drawings and it’s striking. But when you see it in real life, and you consider how much goes into it, it’s like the architect is using your country as a playground?[/B] That’s it exactly. You remember the image I took from Koolhaas’s new book. He is actually teasing about playing with these buildings. These kinds of buildings have never been built. China has become a testing ground for these types of buildings, and the images are so attractive that the Chinese client is drawn to them. But the reality is totally different—it’s a maintenance problem, the high cost of construction, and we will hardly use it. So all of these problems become a burden for the Chinese client. [B]Your firm is called Turenscape, and I understand that “turen” roughly translates to “country bumpkin” or “redneck” in American English. First, is that true, and second, why did you pick this as your firm name?[/B] There are many meanings. First of all, “turen” is two characters in Chinese: “Tu” means earth, the land, and “ren” means people. So it’s really a combination of the land and the people. And that’s what I am going to deal with—the land and the people. The second meaning is because when I went back to China in 1997 from the States, many people expected me to choose a fancy American name, and that’s what many people do. Many people will choose a name like ABC, or CDE, or something like that. I deliberately chose my name to signal that my company is native, it’s local people, because native means you know the land and the people. You know more than anyone else about your own land and your own relationship with the land. [B]I read an article in Time Asia, where you say that China needs to “develop a new system, a new vernacular, to express the changing relationship between land and people.” How would you like to see that new vernacular defined?[/B] When we talk about “vernacular” people always think of “traditional”; they think of traditional Chinese gardens, the traditional way Chinese people live. But that’s past, that’s gone. Today I talked about the classical Chinese garden, which is not vernacular. It was developed for the emperors, as the emperors’ playground. And the real vernacular today is being destroyed by urbanization. We cannot go back to the old vernacular. We cannot go back to the traditional vernacular, because we are being urbanized. With 1.3 billion people being moved to the city, we need another way of dealing with the relationship between the land and the people. What I mean by vernacular is the authentic relationship between the land and people, which means we must build for the contemporary people, for the modern people, and based on modern technology, living style, and a modern understanding of the environment. Based on this new situation, we have to build a new relationship with the land, which means we’re not going to go back to the nostalgic past—the land of peach blossoms. It’s naive to try to go back there. And we certainly cannot go to this beautification model, which is also artificial, and is an extension of the classical gardening approach. Right now there is no authentic relationship between the city and the land, between the new world community and the land, and between the streams and the rivers and the cities. We totally ignore that. That’s why we have to follow the third road, which is to find an authentic relationship between land and people, and that’s the new vernacular. It will be for the common people, not for the mayors, and from the land, not from America or from Europe. From China’s land for Chinese people at this time—that’s the new vernacular. [B]That article also noted an approach to landscape architecture you call “anti-planning.” Can you explain that philosophy?[/B] Anti-planning is what I would say is negative planning, because in planning, you usually want to build something. In China for the past 20 years we always plan to build something, we plan the infrastructure, we plan the city, we promote the urbanization process, we invite outside people to move into the city—that’s positive planning. Now, in this process we totally forget the land. We totally forget that the land has its own living systems. Now, negative planning, or anti-planning, means that we have to build this landscape or living system first. It’s an unbuildable land system, and we have to plan this first. So it’s a negative process—like photo images, you have negative and positive. Instead of trying to just build cities, we have to protect the unbuildable area first, so we use minimal land and minimal ecological infrastructure to allow maximum urban development—not the other way around. This is landscape leading the way of urban development, which is not the way it’s been in the past—not in China, at least. Related Link http://www.asla.org/land/2006/1017/yu.html
