Kongjian Yu Gives Speech at Sudes Conference in Sweden
URBAN WATER, URBAN FORM
SUDes conference
september 21st, 2011
lund, sweden
Summary by Donlyn Lyndon
Water connects, water is everywhere, water is scarce, water delights, intrigues, terrifies; water is wasted, water is provocative, water is our most precious resource. These and many other considerations swirled through enlivening discussions in the conference Urban Water, Urban Form held by SUDes, the Sustainable Urban Design Programme at Lund University’s School of Architecture on September 21, 2011. The annual event is sponsored by the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Sustainable Urban Design. This year’s conference took place in the newly built Great Hall of the School of Architecture, celebrating its renovation. Speakers brought insights and illustrations from their works and studies in China, India, Africa, the USA and Europe, and Kritian Skovbakke Villaden of Gehl Architects moderated the following discussions...
WITHOUT WATER THERE WOULD BE NO URBS: our lives depend on it, coming together in settlements depends on it. Access to water and its management and distribution are essential to our lives.
BUILT SOLUTIONS TO URBAN WATER ISSUES
Kongjian Yu Turenscape
For long we have admired those cultures that have developed the technologies of control and reclamation and the urban forms that have resulted, transforming pools and rivers into channels of commerce and pleasure, creating embankments and building sites along the way in many historic cities. However, when these become too narrowly focused and over-engineered they destroy the potential for innovative, integrative ways of making evocative urban form. Now we are finding diverse new ways to capture this magic.
In China, Kongjian Yu, Dean of the School of Landscape Architecture in Beijing and leader of the firm Turenscape has created an amazing array of new projects, merging innovative approaches to water and landscape with the extraordinary pace of development in China. As consultant to mayors in many cities, he has brought about changes that establish new patterns of relation between people and the landscapes created within the reach of development.
Using examples as varied as the design of a great storm-water park, the Qan Li National Urban Wetland, the riverside Houtan Park in Shanghai associated with the World Expo, and the much publicized and memorable ‘Red Ribbon’ bench and promenade structure weaving through the reclaimed banks of the Tanghe River, as well as the roof garden of his own apartment in Beijing, Yu gave shape and example to his approach to water in the city.
His approach as described in his publication The Art of Survival, centers on integrating ecological process and storm water filtration with bold imagination rooted in agricultural traditions and careful attention to human experience. Noting the contrasting but complementary Chinese concepts of Nu Wa and Da Ya, ‘Fix It’ and ‘Live with it’, Kongjian Yu exercises a fusion of the two…living with the means of natural processes of filtration and growth, and supplementing them with structures that integrate the fiercely aggressive forces of contemporary urbanization and centralized decision-making, through structures that derive from traditional forms of adjustment to the land, like terraced rice paddies and gently banked rivers that accommodate the spread of variable waters.
In these works large areas are laid out with vigorous seasonal plants like tall reeds, sunflowers and rice, or wetland vegetation, which are then crossed through and looked over by elevated urban walkways and benches that weave through the sites, allowing people new experiences of the landscape, at once both far-reaching and intimate, while the processes of ecological filtering and regeneration take place beneath and around them.
IMAGINATIVE NEW WAYS ARE EMERGING
of bringing people into and within the grasp of water, deluging themselves in the refreshing wonder of water - from constructed beaches and water fun houses to subtle pavilions and intricate promenades that merge our bodies and their paths with the sampling of water’s forms and its generative power. These bring people into touch with the stream of life. Water can bring nature close.
There are also great threats that water brings too close to our lives. We have seen in current times a roster of them: drought, flooding, Tsunamis and the rise of water levels globally. These we must urgently take seriously and learn to cope with; they also require that we look in fresh ways and use our greatest efforts to offset the limitations of popular, professional and political outlook that retard integrated responses.
All this is part of an extensive reformation in our understanding of where and how we fit into the larger configuration of forces in our world… and of finding ways of representing that to ourselves in discourse and exploration. Then we must learn to work with it…in real time and in cooperation with others.
What’s called for is a re-forming of our search for urban structure, probing for deep understanding of natural and cultural process and caring for social equities in the distribution and use of our most indispensable resource. It is a work that belongs to all of us.
The task is to absorb and transform the swirling flow of ideas into tangible actions, close to nature, that can help bring about a world of sustainable urban places; actions that meet the challenge posed by Peter Siöström, Director SUDes at the outset of the conference - learning to make places that are ‘both livable and lovable’. The conference, presentations revealed many ways that water, attended to with care and imagination, can help us to meet that challenge. •
SUDES CONFERENCE
Every year the SUDes programme invites 200 students and professionals met to take part in an international and interdisciplinary design conference. The topic of discussion in 2011 was urban water, urban form. This topic combined with last years discussion on urban green, urban form, and expanded on the exploration of a way of describing and designing the city as a holistic, urban tissue. Architects, planners, and landscape architects from around the world commented on their own theoretical and practical approaches.
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