Soak It Up: China

Описание: Kongjian Yu, the Harvard-educated founder and principal designer at the Beijing-based landscape architecture firm Turenscape and 2023 Oberlander Prize laureate, is a champion of the “sponge cities” concept for mitigating urban flooding. Kongjian Yu says he was “born a landscape architect” and cites his childhood in Dong Yu village in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province as where he first understood the interaction between land, plants, water, and people. The careful management of the village’s paddies insured each had sufficient water during the dry season; from this he learned about scale and the subtleness of topography. A pivotal childhood experience during which he nearly drowned made him realize the importance of water as well as how to regulate water, design with water, and combine green and blue (plant materials and water). The concrete channelizing of his village’s water ways and use of chemicals led to pollution and changed his hometown “from a paradise to a hell.” This represents a misuse of industrial technologies and so-called grey infrastructure that has killed nature-based ecosystems. Yu says this has played out elsewhere in the world leading to a global tragedy that is now being accelerated by climate change. All of this propelled his interest in the “sponge cities” concept and the power of the landscape architecture profession to develop and implement nature-based solutions, a new infrastructure. He presents three significant projects before stating that landscape architecture is the only profession that can solve multiple problems at once, and that the biggest mission for landscape architecture is “the creation of a sponge planet.”

Video made in partnership with PlayCore