For 13 years, Professor Yu Kongjian has been working to wake China up to face and address her impending crisis in the relation between humans and the earth.
“Landscape is the medium upon which various natural, cultural and spiritual processes interact,” says Yu, who views his profession, landscape architecture, as the “art of survival, not an art of entertaining and gardening.”
In 1997, Yu returned to Beijing to work as a professor of urban and regional planning at Peking University, after spending three years obtaining a PhD in Design from Harvard Univer¬sity and two years working in the US afterwards.
Now, Yu’s working identity is multiple: He is an educator, founder and dean of the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture in Peking University. He is an entrepreneur as well, founder and president of Turenscape, the largely Chinese private landscape design institute employing over 500 professionals. He is active in influencing policies, and is frequently invited to give lectures to China’s city mayors and government meetings.
Turen, the name Yu chose for his own brand, consists of two characters: earth and men. Putting the two together, turen is a mocking term, often used by urban residents to describe rural working people whose hands are constantly stained by dirt from fieldwork.
It is exactly this mocking that Yu fights to eradicate.
Beauty of wild grass
Yesterday, April 28 Beijing Time, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) announced its 2010 awards. The highest honor of the year, the Award of Excellence, was given to Houtan Park in Shanghai, a restoration of an abandoned industrial landscape along the Huangpu River inside the grounds of the Expo. The design was the work of Turen and Yu.
The honor comes as no surprise. Awarded ASLA awards eight times since 2002, Yu is a star in the world of landscape design. The Yu designed Red Ribbon: Tanghe River Park in Qinhuangdao, a seaside city in Hebei Province has been adopted by ASLA as an image that represents the industry, and was chosen by Condé Nast Traveler magazine as one of the seven modern architectural wonders in the world in April 2008. But Yu’s vision of what constitutes a park is as far from the traditional design concept of a Chinese garden as it is possible to get.
“Why can’t we use agricultural plants, crops, wild grass, and fruits trees to decorate cities and parks? They are equally beautiful but yield fruits and demand little attention,” says Yu, standing in his office, where a half-sliced truck is made into a tea table and plants climb to the ceiling.
Yu doesn’t pay lip service to his ideals. In 2005, he designed the grounds of Shenyang Architectural University, incorporating the existing rice paddies into his concept – manicured lawns and artificial mountains are not part of Yu’s vision of landscape design.
For his award winning Houtan Park, Yu used wild grass and crops to recreate a natural retreat and a water-cleaning machine. The array of plants standing on the layered terrace function as layers of filter for polluting materials, and the polluted Huangpu River water was cleaned and exported to supply the Expo, suitable for all use except for drinking.
Houtan Park’s daily cleaning capacity is 2,400 cubic meters of water. It’s a softening of the Chinese landscape aesthetic, where people can interact with and be part of a natural environment, rather than admiring from afar.
“There is beauty in wild grass,” says Yu. “We don’t see it because we have a twisted aesthetic, taking natural things to be lower class. We are addicted to city beautification: Uprooting agricultural crops and trees on the land, building cities, and importing expensive and fruitless garden plants.”
Yu sees the artificial creation of landscape as having parallels with the old practice of foot binding – twisting and shaping women’s feet out of all recognition. “It is a kind of ludicrous and harmful feudalist aristocratic aesthetic,” says Yu, “It’s like when we bound women’s feet and still viewed it as beautiful and elegant. We now are binding the feet of nature.”
Culture of the ordinary
In 1963, Yu was born in a peasant family in a village near Jinhua, in the middle of Zhejiang Province. His family background was former landlord, which then was categorized as low-grade.
“I had no friends. Peers threw stones at me. And I was also deprived of education several times, even though I had been a really good student,” says Yu. Escaping from man-made hostility, Yu found solace and acceptance in nature, working on the land.
“This influenced my understanding of justice and beauty, and the inter-connection between the two,” says Yu, “the value and culture of the working class, the common people, are largely overlooked prejudicially in Chinese feudalist history.”
In 1980, 17-year-old Yu entered Beijing Forestry University. Having gained a master’s degree in garden design in 1987, Yu began teaching in his department until 1992 when he was admitted to Harvard University on a scholarship.
After his return to China, Yu emerged as a bold and outspoken critic of current urban construction, but still with a hint of humor. Yu confesses that his confidence in being a critic is rooted in his “sound professional training.”
“I would like to invite you to test my words here: The CCTV [Tower] and the Bird’s Nest are to be abandoned and torn down in 20 to 30 years. Not only it is very expensive to build, but also to use,” said Yu to an assembled gathering of city mayors, in Beijing in April.
While saying this, he showed two slides, illustrating the CCTV Tower being used as a multistory farm and the Bird’s Nest transformed into a vegetable market. The slides and Yu’s words triggered laughter from the 50 mayors attending the training program. Yu firmly believes that this mega-concept design, resulting from a mix of a booming economy and globalization is “unaffordable.”
Future vision
Yu has worked relentlessly to promote his vision. He has been kicking out in all directions. The new cultural principle that Yu has been advocating, the “beauty of wild grass and culture of ordinary people,” has gained support that has transcended the landscape designing profession.
After having sent out thousands of copies of landscape designing books at his own expense, he began to see ministry-level officials as supporters, and the core concept of his theory, Ecological Infrastructure, has been adopted by national central planning. His name and image are seen more and more frequently in national and international media, and has become one of the most recognized names in Chinese academia and in the global architectural fraternity.
“I wish that I will be remembered as the one who had called for waking up at an earlier stage and who has introduced initial changes in handling the human-earth relations in contemporary Chinese civilization,” says Yu. “We are transforming our landscape at a scale and velocity that never has been seen in our 5,000 years’ civilization.
“The picture I wish to see is that our motherland restores its natural beauty and revives its functions. I want to free rivers from the man-made bonds that are paralyzing them.”