Kongjian Yu


Kongjian Yu is a Chinese ecological urbanist, urban planner and landscape architect, professor of landscape architecture at Peking University and the founder of the planning and design office in Beijing.

Career

Kongjian Yu received his Doctor of Design Degree at The Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1995, with the dissertation, "Security Patterns in Landscape Planning: With a Case in South China" with Carl Steinitz, Richard Forman and Stephen Ervin as his advisors. He went back to China after worked as landscape planner and architect at in Laguna Beach for two years in 1997. He has been a professor of urban and regional planning at Peking University since 1997, is the founder and Dean of the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at PKU, and is now the . He founded in 1998, an internationally awarded firm with about 600 professionals. Yu and 's practice covers architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism across scales. Yu defines landscape architecture as the art of survival, and tries to protect and reconstruct as holistic nature- based solution to provide ecosystems services for cities, and to define a new aesthetics, the "" based on environmental ethic. His pioneering research on the "",Negative Planning and "sponge cities" have been adopted by the Chinese government as a guiding theory for national land use planning, eco-city campaign, and urban ecological restoration.
A native of China's Zhejiang Province, his guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary, such as rural agricultural landscapes, and a deep embracing of nature, even in its potentially destructive aspects, such as urban flooding. He is a designed ecologist and he practices design as scientific experiments. He got inspirations from his farming experience and the ancient wisdom of water and waste management to design and test a series of nature-based solutions, such as constructed wetland for water cleansing, green sponge for storm water management, ecosystems services oriented design for brown field remediation, etc. He has made these solutions to become replicable ecological engineering modules to be implemented at large scale to solve ecological problems, such as flood, draught, water and soil pollution and habitat rehibiliation,thorugh which landscape in deep form---as oppostite to shallow form or fake form—can be created.
Yu's ecological approach to urbanism has been implemented in over 200 cities in China and abroad. He has won numerous international awards for his ecologically and culturally sensitive projects, including 12 , an in 2009, and at the World Architecture Festival.

Published works

Yu has published over 20 books and 300 articles. Sponge City, , , and are some of the key words that depicted his design philosophy and research. His works have been featured in publications such as Scientific American, Time, and Landscape Architecture, and two recently published books: , and ''.

Achievements

He is the founder and chief editor of the internationally awarded magazine Landscape Architecture Frontier. He lectured worldwide at over 100 institutes including American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, World Economic Forum, World Bank, Harvard University, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and many others, and had delivered over 60 keynote speeches at international conferences including 5 time keynote speeches at the World Congress of the International Federation of Landscape Architects and 3 time speeches at the annual conference and expo, and taught for 5 year at Harvard GSD as visiting professor. He was a juror for the 2010 Aga Khan Award for Architecture., and its Steering Committee in 2015–2016, and the Super Jury for 2011 World Architecture Festival, and many other international award juries.
He was Changjiang Scholars Program award winner, Chinese Ministry of Education,2011. He was elected fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2012, and International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. He received the from the Sapienza University of Rome in 2017, and the from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in 2019.

Notable Works

Yu's projects received both 2009 and 2010 World Architectural Festival Awards of Landscape, the 2009 ULI Global Award for Excellence, the 2010 and 2012 ASLA award of Excellence, and 10 ASLA Honor Awards, 4 Excellence on the Waterfront Awards, the 2004 National Gold Medal of Fine Arts of China

Honors

International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,2016
Doctor Honoris Causa in Landscape and Environment the Sapienza University of Rome,2017
Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 2019.
Fellow, American Society of Landscape Architects,2012
Changjiang Scholars Program award winner, Chinese Ministry of Education,2011
Thousand Talents Program award Winner, Chinese Central Government, 2011

Professional prizes

Books

Books