on kongjian yu’s art of the landscape
Born a peasant’s son, Yu Kongjian grew up working in agricultural fields. Land was both part of the daily life and the source of livelihood. His hometown is situated in the heart of Zhejiang Province, a region famous for its scenic mountain-water, and rich in vernacular architecture. The time-honored Feng-shui concept remains deep in people’s beliefs and plays important roles in site planning for villages, residences, temples and tombs, etc.
Chinese landscape culture is one of the overarching interests of Yu Kongjian. Since the end of the 1980s, Yu has studied Feng-shui theory in the light of modern analytic methods based on geography, ecology and environmental psychology. His stay in the US did not interrupt this interest but added new thoughts to it. As a contemporary landscape architect and urban designer, he respected Feng-shui for its role in place making while fighting against its superstitious operation. Using evolutionary and anthropological approaches, he explored the origin, structure and meanings of Feng-shui and the ideal Chinese landscape models. Adapting statistic data, together with field observation and literature review, Yu recognized that the Feng-shui landscapes share similar structures with other Chinese ideal landscape patterns. Soon after his return to China, he published his first book: Tracing the Origin of Ideal Landscapes: the Cultural Meanings of Feng-shui and Ideal Landscape (1998).
During the past ten years, Yu Kongjian has been slowly building up the edifice of contemporary landscape architecture in China. As a professor, Yu convinced people, from the university planning committee to national education administration, of the importance of landscape architecture as a discipline and created the landscape architecture program in Beijing University from scratch. As a practitioner, Yu is the owner, president, and the design principle of Turenscape founded one year after the design school in 1998. Turenscape (Turen means “earth man” in Chinese) embedded his ideal of design for a harmonious living environment that unifies the worlds of nature, human beings and spirituality (天地-人-神).
Through all these activities, Yu has developed a body of landscape thinking based on his understanding and engagement with the reality, demands and concerns of today’s Chinese society. Firstly, he sees landscape architecture as the important part of an integrative construction process for a new world. Taking landscape and ecology as points of departure, he has promoted the concepts of “Landscape Security Pattern”, “Ecological Infrastructure” and “Negative Planning” on the levels of urban and regional planning. Secondly, he advocates a new aesthetics that is productive and functional, insisting on design as “the art of survival” and being adamantly against formalism and aestheticism. In recent years, his outspoken criticism of traditional imperial and literati gardens in opposition to the vernacular and the agricultural has stirred controversy, debates and thinking among designers and scholars. The numerous projects his office has built provide good demonstrations of his ideas such as “The Beauty of Weeds”, “Protection of Agricultural Landscape and Industrial Heritage” and “Vernacular Urbanism”. Finally, it is worth emphasizing that Yu sees education, in a broader sense, as his paramount task in the hope to elevate awareness of all parties in the process of landscape creation. He has not only published textbooks and journals, but also a pedagogical book tailor-made for decision-makers- The Path to Urban Landscape: Exchanges with Mayors (2003), a best-seller reprinted more than 10 times.
Born a peasant’s son, Yu Kongjian grew up working in agricultural fields. Land was both part of the daily life and the source of livelihood. His hometown is situated in the heart of Zhejiang Province, a region famous for its scenic mountain-water, and rich in vernacular architecture. The time-honored Feng-shui concept remains deep in people’s…