DEAN'S JOURNAL-CHINA
Peking University invited me back to China to participate in a Landscape Urbanism Conference, hosted by the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture and Dean Kongjian Yu. I arrived on October 28 and stayed in a converted courtyard house in a hutong neighborhood in the heart of the city. The autumn weather was wonderful and little finches skipped around the courtyard of Jihouse Hotel below a yellow-leafed ginkgo tree.
On Thursday, October 29, I met with Kongjian Yu, the editors of the Landscape Architecture China magazine, and about 30 doctoral students from Peking University. The Graduate School occupies one floor of a new building at the university, with another floor housing Kongjian's firm, Turenscape, and the magazine. The doctoral students are engaged in projects ranging from mapping the landscapes of the nation to detailed research sites in Beijing and other cities.
Late that day, I visited the Olympic Green with the Bird's Nest and Water Cube. Even on a Thursday afternoon, the area was crowded with tourists and other visitors. Clearly, the Olympic site remains a popular place to visit.
The following day, Professor Li Di-Hua of the Peking University faculty took two other conference speakers and me to Tianjin to visit a Turenscape project. Along the way, we traveled on a new expressway parallel to the new high-speed rail line between Beijing and the Tianjin. The drive takes two hours, as compared with 30 minutes by the bullet train. The project, Qiaoyuan Park, was impressive even on a brisk autumn day. Kongjian Yu's design involved reclaiming a brownfield into a park with a series of stormwater catchment ponds at various elevations with native plants.
The weather turned cooler on Saturday as the conference began. The conference featured an impressive group of speakers, including Hu Cunzhi, the deputy minister of Land Resources; Kelly Shannon, an urbanist from Leuven University in Belgium; Tony McCormick from Australia, one of the designers of the Sydney Olympics; ecologist Bart Johnson from the University of Oregon; Haruto Kobayashi, a leading Japanese landscape architect; Charles Waldheim, the new landscape architecture chair at Harvard; Dennis Pieprz, the president of Sasaki; Wang Li of the Shanghai Planning Department; and Gerdo Aquino of SWA and USC. Lively panel sessions were held with prominent practitioners and academics. The conference attracted some 500 attendees from all over China and was so popular that people had to be turned away. The interest is indicative of the growing popularity of landscape architecture in China, now with approximately 170 academic programs as opposed to only one program in the 1990s.
A central theme of the conference was expressed by Kelly Shannon who asked: "Can landscape save Asian urbanism?" Certainly, considerable optimism was expressed in response to her question. For instance, Charles Waldheim observed, "landscape has emerged as the medium by which the city is formed."
On November 1, the second day of the conference, an early snow blanketed Beijing. The finches at the courtyard were moved indoors and everyone put on warmer clothing. Snowmen appeared on the Peking University campus. Dean Kongjian Yu noted that this was "the best and earliest snow in the past decade" and that "if we have snow, we will have a most productive year."
Monday morning was even colder but had incredibly blue skies. The smog had disappeared and the snowy mountains to the west and north of Beijing were clear in the distance. I give a lecture at Tsinghua University before heading to the airport. I was greeted by many old friends at Tsinghua, many of whom expressed an interest in doing another joint studio with our school.
I hurried to the airport to catch my flight to San Francisco, which was cancelled; so I spent another evening in Beijing, but this time at a high rise on the 3rd Ring Road, instead of my quaint hutong courtyard. At least the views were spectacular from my thirteenth-floor room. While waiting to depart the next morning, I learned the good news that both our undergraduate and graduate architecture programs were ranked 5th in the nation by the most recent DesignIntelligence survey. In addition, our undergraduate program was the second "most admired" by other architecture deans.
In San Francisco, I attended the annual Urban Land Institute Conference. The big take-away message, articulated by keynote speaker Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist, is that the nation is entering a period of "paranoid optimism" concerning the future. Several participants mentioned to me that they are beginning to recruit new employees again, so I came away optimistic (and not very "paranoid").
A highlight of the conference was the announcement of the Urban Land Institute J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development going to Amanda Burden, chair of the New York City Planning Commission and director of the Department of City Planning. She moderated a session of city planning directors on November 5, devoted to "What Makes a World Class City?" City planning directors from Portland, Seattle, San Diego, and San Francisco participated. They focused on the importance of sustainable development, good design, dense development near public transit, and clear visions for the future.
Back in Austin, I attended the reopening of the LBJ Library and Plaza, designed by Overland Partners, on November 13. The new plaza features gardens of native plants dedicated to Lady Bird Johnson.
—Fritz Steiner
Frederick Steiner
Dean, School of Architecture
Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture
The University of Texas at Austin
Frederick Steiner is the dean of the School of Architecture and Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture, University of Texas at Austin. As a Fulbright-Hays scholar in 1980, he conducted research on ecological planning at the Wageningen University, The Netherlands. In 1998, he was the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an Academic Fellow of the Urban Land Institute. He is a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Dean Steiner has worked with local, state, and federal agencies on diverse environmental plans and designs. Currently, he chairs the five-county Envision Central Texas Project, having served on its board of directors and executive committee since ECT was established in 2002. He is also currently part of a UT team that organized an exhibit on the resilience of the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans for the 2006 Venice Biennale. In 2005, he was on a team, selected from over 1,000 entries, to be one of five finalists in the United Flight 93 National Memorial Competition in Pennsylvania.
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