"The Sponge Evangelist: With the biennial Oberlander Prize in hand, Turenscape’s Kongjian Yu, FASLA, wants to expand the global profile of landscape architecture," Landscape Architecture Magazine, February 29, 2024.
In awarding the second biennial Oberlander Prize to the Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, FASLA, the Cultural Landscape Foundation and its 2023 jury sent an unmistakable signal about the future of the field. For the prize, which seeks to function as a counterpart to architecture’s Pritzker Prize, Yu is a resonant international figure whose theory of sponge cities saw its influence and exposure steadily grow in the past decade. Gray infrastructure and channelized rivers of the past century are being increasingly daylit and replaced with naturalized environments that absorb water and restore wildlife habitats. Given the accelerating climate crisis and its impact on hydrological cycles, Yu now talks about the need for a “sponge planet,” updated to reflect the urgency of climate adaptation facing human settlements worldwide.
The Oberlander’s inaugural laureate, Julie Bargmann (see “The Stranger Territory,” LAM, December 2021), highlighted landscape architecture’s concern for the quality of soil that life depends on with her focus on reclamation of land degraded by industrial production. Yu’s focus, by contrast, is on the crucial role of water for survival.
But for those familiar with his work and personal story, Yu is more than a theorist of a popular idea. He’s an extraordinary educator who founded China’s first landscape architecture program at Peking University in 1997, graduating hundreds of master’s and doctoral degree students who have gone on to teach, practice, and influence design, development, and policy throughout China and the world.
As a child, Yu grew up on a farm and witnessed the cyclical flow of water through the landscape, the recycling of nutrients in crops, and the resurgence of fish stocks during monsoon seasons. Between 1992 and 1995, he completed a design doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, studying with Carl Steinitz, Honorary ASLA; Richard T. T. Forman; and Stephen Ervin, FASLA, among others. At Harvard, he supplemented his intuitive sense of how nature functioned in the context of traditional farming methods with technical research on ecological design and planning.
Returning to a rapidly urbanizing China in the late 1990s was a shock, he says. His village had been destroyed, paved over with concrete. “When I returned in 1997, I saw that all Chinese cities developed by laying out a grid system of gray infrastructure that copies the American and Western model,” he says. “Rivers channelized, fishponds filled, concrete paving of well lines: the natural infrastructure disappeared. There was a whole vacuum in China of how to deal with urbanism. In 2002, I proposed a nature-based ecological approach to planning: ecology first. Planning must be on ecological thinking as opposed to population projections.”
