Groudbreaker: Kongjian Yu

With curves inspired by local land patterns, a red steel wall creats seating as well as a planting bed for yellow daylilies at a park in Tianjin City, China, designed by Kongjian YU

 

As the world gaped in awe at the massive topiaries and acres of plants installed for the z008 Olympics in Beijing, Kongjian Yu was taking a more skeptical view. How much would the city’s air quality have been improved, he wondered, if 40 million trees had been planted instead of millions of potted flowers? And as for Shanghai’s ornamental garden spaces, Yu offers a one-word critique:”frippery. ”Such commentary is typical of the tall courtly, outspoken 47-year-old who in 2006 was dubbed “China’s pre-eminent groundbreaker landscape architect” by Time magazine.

 

Indeed, Yu sees the role of landscape architecture as more than mere beautification. It is a crucial component of conserving natural beauty and resources—especially in China, where, Yu says, “We are at the edge of survival.”
 

In recent talks and articles, including an interview with the American Society of Landscape Architects, YU summarized the state of environmental affairs in his homeland with a litany of dispiriting statistics: 70 percent of China’s surface water has been polluted,50 percent of its wetland habitat has been lost, more than 25,000 dams have been built, and channeling has destroyed most of the country’s natural river systems. And while YU stresses that he is proud of China’s intention and eagerness to develop alternative energy sources, he is disparaging of the nation’s record when it comes to 1andscape design, a field he sees as stuck in China’s past. For too long the main impulse behind gardens and public landscapes in China, he says, has been the “pleasure-seeking of the elite: the familiar, oft-imitated traditional-style gardens of pavilions, pagodas, ponds, rockery and koi — as seen in the U. S. at classical Chinese gardens in Portland, Oregon, and at the Huntington in San Marino, California. He is pushing for a new template for landscape design, one based on practical, sustainable principles and “local vernacular materials” derived from a millennia-old agrarian tradition.

 

Above: A red ribbon of fiberglass and steeI — with cutouts for night lighting and grasses — and a boardwalk wind through a grove of poplar trees at Tanghe River Park, Qinhuangdao City, China. The design captures the environmental problem—solving and whimsy of landscape architect Kongiian Yu .  

 

To take just one recent example of how Yu has put those principles into practice, consider his landscape design for the new campus of Shenyang Jianzhu University, an architecture and engineering institute in northeastern China. Productive rice fields contoured in bold geometric patterns create dynamic, seasonally changing beauty while serving as an open-air classroom demonstration of sustainability. Frogs are raised there to control insects. Sheep keep the grass clipped. Students harvest the rice.

 

Yu credits much of his appreciation of nature and his understanding of China’s overwhelming environmental challenges to his own hands-on agricultural upbringing. Growing up in southeastern China during the Cultural Revolution his landlord. Class family disenfranchised, Yu was forced to work in the fields and postpone his education. Three-plus decades later, he has more than caught up, earning a master’s degree  in landscape architecture from Beijing  Forestry University and a doctor of design  degree from Harvard. In 1997 after completing his studies and spending nearly two  years working in California for the prestigious SWA Group—Yu returned to China  to build the graduate landscape—architecture  program from the ground up at Peking  University. There he serves as the section’s dean of graduate studies, a program that now includes 160 students. He also founded one of China’s largest Landscape Architecture firms, Turenscape, which has some 500 employees and does regional landscape planning, designing gardens large and small, as well as parks and public spaces.

 

Above: Steel “lotus canopies” in pink and purple shade a sitting area around a pond at Houtan’s new park. Yu calls this a colorful celebration of the water being reborn” through the wetland’s purification system

For Yu, turning to ancient agricultural traditions and landscapes for inspiration is not an aesthetic compromise. In his view, he is not “demeaning the value of beauty and pleasure in our lives.” Far from it. “What I am arguing,” he says,” is that in our resource-depleted and ecologically damaged  and threatened era, the built environment must and will adapt a new aesthetic grounded in appreciation of the beauty of productive, ecology—supporting things.” He points out that some of the world’s most beloved designed 1andscapes in fact have roots in agriculture: Italian terraced gardens hark back to hillside vineyards；the sweeping lawns and wooded groves of British estate gardens evoke pasturelands. Why not also draw on the orderly and verdant rural landscapes of China’s past?
 

When making this point, Yu often employs the metaphor of “beautiful big feet” a reference to the ancient practice among aristocratic Chinese women of binding their feet to distinguish them from rustic people, and to satisfy a male desire for daintiness. Yu, by contrast, says a more enduring beauty is embodied by the unbound feet of “strong and healthy peasant girls” That is to say. Naturally inspired, minimally managed landscapes are inherently more beautiful and more sustainable than precious, manicured ones. Yu has harsh words too for importers of aesthetics from other cultures, especially “the Chinese mayors” who visit the U. S. and Europe. And return with visions of transplanting baroque landscapes, grandiose buildings and wasteful flower displays.” The aesthetic of uselessness, leisure and adornment has taken over as part of a larger overwhelming urge to appear modern and sophisticated,” YU laments.

 

Above: With seed heads ready to harvest, rice is both a crop and a bold design statement at the Shenyang Jianzhu University campus. The design reflects Yu’s philosophy that a landscape can be productive and beautiful using sustainable concepts of ancient Chinese agriculture.  

 

Earlier this year, Turenscape won three awards from the ASLA, including the coveted Award of Excellence in the General Design category. The winning projects directly address the escalating environmental problems that China faces, and in each one, Yu has put his pragmatic, big—feet  philosophy into practice by restoring damaged sites and devising ecology—based, agrarian- inspired solutions. Each project marries sustainability with contemporary designs, attracting crowds of people, some of whom will likely come away with a greater appreciation of natural ecosystems and China’s agricultural heritage. In Shanghai, Houtan Park was created on the site of an abandoned steel factory and shipyard on the polluted Huangpu River.  The park’s terraces and cascades act as water purifiers that use wetland plant species to absorb pollutants. The heavily visited park was designed for the Expo 2010 Shanghai as the site for displays and exhibits demonstrating solutions to environmental problems.

A 54-acre park in Tianjin, in northeastern China, was developed from another polluted site, a shooting range that had become a garbage dump. There, Yu employed what he calls “adaptation palettes”: plant communities that are adapted to specific 10cations.   These plant collectives are 1argely untended. allowed to fend for themselves as part of Yu’s ”new aesthetics of landscape” as he describes it: ”Untidy forms unplanned biodiversity and nature’s messiness keep going, letting plants live and expose their genuine beauty to enrich the landscape” The third winning project is a waterfront park in Qinhuangdao City, where Turenscape rehabilitated an eroded, neglected section of beach. Yu’s solutions included a winding boardwalk that protects against erosion and acquaints visitors with native plants, which Yu introduced to stabilize the dunes.  Perhaps Yu’s most eye. catching public design is the ”Red Ribbon” a green space along the Tanghe River in Qinhuangdao City that won an ASLA award in 2007. An example of what he calls “ecological minimalism,” the park encourages recreation and educational use of the riverbank while preserving natural habitats. The 500 meter-long ribbon, made of fiberglass with steel inside, incorporates a boardwalk, seating and lighting. Along the way, four fancifully designed cloud-shaped pavilions interpret nature.

 

As for Yu’s future plans, they are as ambitious as China’s drive to modernity. Among other things, he speaks of utopian” new gar- den cities” in which 1ittle or no carbon is emitted. where rain is captured for irrigation, and where green spaces are filled with crops and fruit trees. Always, he says, “We must depend on nature, not technology, for survival.