EVENT: “LITTLE FEET, BIG FEET: China’s Urbanization and Aesthetic Revolution”
Title: EVENT: “LITTLE FEET, BIG FEET: China’s Urbanization and Aesthetic Revolution”
Location: NYC,41 East 11th Street room 741
Description: Speaker: Kongjian Yu
Location: NYC,41 East 11th Street room 741
Description: Speaker: Kongjian Yu
Dean and Professor of The Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, Peking University; President, Turenscape; Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design
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Start Time: 13:00
Date: 2010-05-12
End Time: 16:00
Date: 2010-05-12
End Time: 16:00
For more than a thousand years, young Chinese girls were forced to bind their feet in order to be able to marry citified elites. This Movement from Rusticus to Urbanitas continues today. Each year 1% of China’s 1.3 billion population will move to the city, to become urbanized or citified, tying the city through a cosmetic surgery of their landscape. The inherited values about urbanity not only changed the city itself, but the whole landscape of China. The rough and wild rivers are channelized and lined with marble stone; the rustic wetlands are replaced by shining furnished ponds and fountains; the “messy” native shrubs are uprooted and replaced by ornaments while the harsh native grasses are replaced by ever-green exotic lawn which consumes a huge amount of water.
In the overwhelming “City Beautiful Movement” in China today, the art of urban design and landscape design has lost its way in searching for a meaningful style, resulting in meaningless forms and exotic grandeur. Examples in contemporary China include the new Olympic park and the steel-wasteful “bird nest”, the dangerous flamboyant CCTV tower, and the energy-wasteful National Opera House. All these facilities of a new urbanity reflect the same values inherited from the dead high class in the past centuries and do nothing more than accelerate degradation of our survival environment. The question to be asked: Is this sustainable? This big picture leads Dr. Yu to argue that landscape and urban design should be recovered as an art of survival and as a tool to redefine urbanity: “The new vernacular”. In order to do that, an aesthetic revolution is necessary. The new aesthetic is based on environmental and ecological ethics. Yu will illustrate his argument of new aesthetics with multiple projects he designed and have been proven to be successful, including the Zhongshan Shipyard Park, the Rice Campus of Shenyang Architecture University, The Floating Gardens of Yongning River Park, The Red Ribbon Tanghe River Park and the Negative Approach to Urban Development in City and Taizhou, and the 2010 Shnaghai Expo. Houtan Park.
Time Magazine celebrated Kongjian Yu’s ecologically and culturally sensitive design as “A Force of Nature”,(Time Magazine, 17 April 2006, pp58-60), Conde Nast Traveler’s April issue picks Yu’s Design of Red Ribbon Tanghe River Park as a “new seven wonders of the architecture world”. The American Society of Landscape Architects awarded five of his projects as National Design Honor Award which have gained international recognition and will be presented by Dr. Kongjian Yu to illustrate his thinking about “The New Vernacular” and urbanity in contemporary China relating this theory to fields like sustainability, tradition, cultural identity and modernization in an international context.
For lecture reference, please see the article below:
Kongjian Yu received his PhD from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1995. After two years in the Laguna, CA office of SWA Group, he joined the faculty of urban and regional planning at Peking University and founded and became dean of the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University. He is also the founder and president of Turenscape, an internationally–awarded firm with more than 300 professionals and one of the first and largest private landscape architecture and architecture firms in China. Dr. Yu is a five–time winner of American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Awards for his ecologically and culturally sensitive projects. In 2004, Dr. Yu won China’s National Gold Medal of Fine Arts and was awarded the Oversea Chinese Pioneer Achievement Medal for his overall contribution to the nation. Dr. Yu was the keynote speaker for the 40th and 43rd IFLA World Congresses, and the 2006 and 2008 ASLA annual conferences. He serves as consulting expert for the
Ministry of Housing, Rural and Urban Construction of China for the cities of Beijing and Suzhou. Dr. Yu has published more than 200 papers and 15 books. His current book is The Art of Survival–Recovering Landscape Architecture. He is the chief editor of Landscape Architecture China. His major research interests include the theory and method of landscape architecture, urban planning for sustainable cities, cultural heritage, and ecological planning.
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