Designed Ecologies

DESIGNED ECOLOGIES DESIGNED ECOLOGIES The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu

“Kongjian Yu is probably the most important Chinese landscape architect of our time. His work points to highly effective and creative ways to address urgent urban growth, environmental, and resource issues not only in China but around the world.”

James Corner

“Yu’s projects have a high quality of craftsmanship that is rare in Asia these days. They are focused on both environmental issues such as native vegetation and sustainable water systems and on cultural features that encourage public use and stimulation.”

Herbert Dreiseitl

“The strength of Kong jian Yu’s practice lies in its imaginative capacity to regenerate ordinary and discarded sites of industrial production, something achieved through the creative calibration of ecological processes and their aesthetic consequences.”

Mohsen Mostafavi

“Kongjian has, through his brilliant work, presented both an example and a challenge to us all.”

Peter Walker

Kong jian Yu and his office Turenscape are beyond doubt the foremost landscape architecture practice in China today. The vast scale of China and her apparently boundless growth have enabled Yu to test many ideas that are still largely theories in the Western world.

His work has attained an extremely high and elegant level in both conception and execution. Kongjian Yu is known for his ecological stance, often against the resistance of local authorities. His guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary and a deep embracing of nature, even in its potentially destructive aspects, such as floods. Among his most acclaimed projects are Houtan Park for Shanghai Expo, the Red Ribbon Park in Qinhuangdao, and Shipyard Park in Zhongshan. This book explores Yu’s work in eleven essays by noted authors and documents twenty-two projects in detail.

The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu WILLIAM S. SAUNDERS (ED.)

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Foreword KONGJIAN YU’S CHALLENGE

POPULAR AESTHETICS, PUBLIC HISTORY

Peter Walker

John Beardsley

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RESHAPE AN URBAN WATERFRONT: YINZHOU CENTRAL RIVER TRANSFORMATION, NINGBO

Introduction ECOLOGY, WITH PLEASURE

VALUE THE ORDINARY: ZHONGSHAN SHIPYARD PARK, ZHONGSHAN

William S. Saunders

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FIASCOES OF CHINESE URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND TURENSCAPE’S ALTERNATIVES Antje Stokman 42

THE BIG FOOT REVOLUTION Kongjian Yu 50

GO PRODUCTIVE: THE RICE CAMPUS OF SHENYANG JIANZHU UNIVERSITY, SHENYANG 56

THE ART FIELD: NORTH GRANT PARK, CHICAGO 60

THE BOY WHO READ BOOKS RIDING A WATER BUFFALO William S. Saunders

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TREAD LIGHTLY: RED RIBBON PARK, QINHUANGDAO 94

REGENERATE SURGICALLY: BEACH RESTORATION, QINHUANGDAO 100

TRANSFORMING A WORKING LANDSCAPE: QINHUANGDAO FOREST PARK, QINHUANGDAO 106

THE ACTIVIST EDUCATOR Frederick R. Steiner 116

LET NATURE DO HER WORK: THE ADAPTATION PALETTES OF QIAOYUAN WETLAND PARK, TIANJIN 124

GATHER PEOPLE: BRIDGED GARDENS, TIANJIN

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MAKE FRIENDS WITH FLOODS: THE FLOATING GARDENS OF YONGNING RIVER PARK, TAIZHOU

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GATHER PEOPLE: LONG SLEEVE SKYWALK, XUZHOU

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GATHER PEOPLE: DUJIANGYAN SQUARE, CHENGDU

LET LANDSCAPE LEAD URBANISM: GROWTH PLANNING FOR BEIJING, BEIJING

Afterword THE PERSISTENT PROMISE OF ECOLOGICAL PLANNING Charles Waldheim

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GATHER PEOPLE: CHINATOWN PARK, BOSTON

BEGIN WITH ECOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE: WULIJIE ECO-CITY, WULIJIE

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MYTHS AND STRATEGIES OF ECOLOGICAL PLANNING Kristina Hill 152

A GREEN SPONGE FOR A WATER-RESILIENT CITY: QUNLI STORM WATER PARK, HARBIN 164

LANDSCAPE AS A LIVING SYSTEM: HOUTAN PARK, SHANGHAI 184

CHINA’S WATER RESOURCES AND HOUTAN PARK Peter G. Rowe 192

REINVENT THE GOOD EARTH: NATIONAL ECOLOGICAL SECURITY PATTERN PLAN, CHINA 200

(R)EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURES Kelly Shannon

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RECOVER THE MOTHER RIVER: SANLIHE GREENWAY, QIAN’AN 234

ACTIVATE A RESILIENT RIVER: MINNEAPOLIS WATERFRONT DESIGN CONCEPT, MINNEAPOLIS 242

MAKE ARCHITECTURE INTO LANDSCAPE: LOW-CARBON APARTMENT, BEIJING 246

MAKE LANDSCAPE INTO ARCHITECTURE: HALLELUJAH CONCERT HALL, ZHANGJIAJIE

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Authors 254

Project Credits 256

Illustration Credits

JOHN BEARDSLEY

POPULAR AESTHETICS, PUBLIC HISTORY

When Kongjian Yu pitches a project to party officials or municipal administrators, his presentation is selfconsciously freighted with revolutionary rhetoric.1 Dismissing both traditional Chinese gardens and ornamental urban horticulture as expressions of “little foot” aesthetics, akin to the ancient practice of binding and making smaller the feet of upper-class girls to secure them high-ranking husbands, he trumpets instead the virtues of “big foot” aesthetics, rooted in the productive landscapes and cultural practices of ordinary people.

Pictures of the young Mao and healthy peasant women appear in his PowerPoint presentations, against a backdrop of Chinese flags and cheering workers. With humor and even a bit of irony—to an American observer at least—he claims rather broadly that “little foot” aesthetics are responsible not only for banal urban planning schemes but also for widespread environmental degradation: They have privileged the ornamental over the functional, the urban over the rural, with the consequences that people no longer know how to live in an environmentally secure and sustainable way. Drought, flood, habitat loss, and pollution are the outcomes.

win some converts among public administrators to his positions, which he advances through lectures, books, articles, television programs, and teaching. He lectures regularly to the Mayors’ Forum of the national Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development; he estimates he has spoken to this executive training group two or three times a year since 1997, with about fifty mayors in attendance each time. He developed his ideas into a book, A Path to Urban Landscape: Talks to Mayors in 2003. 2 The book has been widely distributed in China, in part by Yu himself; it is now in its thirteenth printing, with over 16,000 copies in circulation. Yu has presented his ideas on television—he estimates he has been on the air thirty times in the past decade, ten of those on Chinese Central Television. He has written numerous other books, articles, and conference papers; he is also the chief editor of the periodical Landscape Architecture China. He and his firm, Turenscape, count an increasing number of cities among their clients, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang, Zhongshan, and Chengdu; Yu has also served on urban planning committees for Beijing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Zhongshan, and on provincial planning committees for Qinghai and Shandong. 3

His argument is loaded, and much more complicated than he allows; environmental devastation in China has been caused as much by decades of reckless industrialization and metastatic urbanization as by effete aesthetics. Nevertheless, and although criticism of current urban design and environmental management policies is explicit in his presentations, he has begun to

On a visual level, there is a great deal of evidence in contemporary Chinese cities to support Yu’s claims, especially about the failures of urban design. The typical urban landscape in contemporary China, as he points out, is expensive, ornamental, and high-maintenance.

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Almost everywhere you look, regimented rows of trees alternate with tightly pruned shrubs almost invariably interspersed with clipped hedges and beds of brightly hued flowers and ornamental plants. Highway margins, urban streets, public squares look relentlessly uniform.

In contrast, Yu offers a vision of beauty rooted in notions of productivity, both agricultural and ecological: crop fields and rice paddies, wetlands and farm ponds, rivers and forests. These are landscapes that produce food, clean water, and habitats that can provide both cultural and ecological services. Against the tidy and the ornamental, he celebrates the messy and the rustic: “the beauty of weeds,” as he puts it, both in conversation and in the title of one of his books.4 Vernacular, productive landscapes are crucial to his notions of ecological and cultural survival, which he attempts to address at all scales in his work. I leave it to others to assess his strategies at national and regional levels; my focus is the expression of vernacular, or “messy,” aesthetics in the urban context, where in some respects they are most incongruous—and even, in the Chinese context, revolutionary.

Poster of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution.

Yu, with just a hint of irony, suggests a Maoist return to the ways of “the people” in managing landscapes.

Typical Beijing median strip with ornamental plants requiring extensive maintenance: Yu considers this wasteful and superficial beautification.

Ironically, Yu may owe some of his affection for the vernacular landscape to his experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Born in Zhejiang Province in 1963 into a family who lost their lands and seed-oil mills in the wake of the Communist takeover in 1949, some of his first memories are of their house being ransacked for jewelry and furniture, and of the family being herded through the streets to public confessions. He recalls his parents being obliged to provide free labor to the village as street cleaners; he was even kept out of middle school for a year as part of his family’s punishment for being property owners. But summers, he recounts, were spent working on the community’s collective farm, planting and harvesting rice, tending vegetables, and caring for water buffaloes, work that also occupied him during his year out of school. He insists this is in large measure where his attachment to vernacular and productive landscapes was formed—an attachment based not as much on the appearances of these landscapes as on their functions or, more accurately, on the close analogy between appearances and functions.

As an adult, Yu has pursued a decades-long challenge to transmit this vernacular language to design. As the only one of six hundred in his county’s secondary school to pass university entrance exams, he was admitted to Beijing Forestry University in 1980. Because his examination score was higher than that required for forestry, he was invited to enroll in the landscape gardening program, which he recalls as the only university program in the field at the time in China. There, he learned the precepts of traditional Chinese garden design and horticulture, “but no ecology.” He went on to earn a Master’s degree in landscape architecture in 1987, learning qualitative and quantitative landscape analysis and large-scale planning methods, especially through an introduction to the ideas of landscape architect and geographer Ervin H. Zube (1931–2002) and regional planner and Harvard professor Carl Steinitz. 5 Yu deepened his exposure to these ideas while studying for his 1995 Doctor of Design degree at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

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VALUE THE ORDINARY: ZHONGSHAN SHIPYARD PARK ZHONGSHAN, GUANGDONG PROVINCE, CHINA, 2001

At the beginning of the new millennium, China changed dramatically. Urbanization accelerated, state-owned factories went bankrupt, and millions of workers lost their jobs. Together with other old buildings and the vernacular landscape, old factories that occupied central urban space were demolished for new development, less because their land had high value than because they were considered outmoded and ugly. At the same time, city governments had become rich, largely thanks to the preceding years’ open economic policy. China’s “City Beautiful Movement” heated up, mixing European Baroque and traditional Chinese imperial aesthetics. 1 Vernacular landscapes were replaced with landscapes of ornamental horticulture and rockery copied from Chinese classical gardens, along with deliberately odd-shaped buildings and structures.

The Cultural Revolution was a sensitive, undiscussed topic. Parks were still gated gardens with entrance fees, maintained as places for holidays and special events.

When Kong jian Yu returned from the United States to China in 1997, he criticized the country’s “City Beautiful” urban design and ornamental gardening as wasteful and called for the preservation of vernacular heritage landscapes, including the industrial. 2 Shipyard Park offered the first chance for him to express these values and aesthetics.3 Zhongshan Shipyard Park demonstrates the integration of ecological, social, economic, and cultural considerations and chiefly had four objectives: First, value the ordinary and even the outmoded and consider the socialist industrial heritage of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to be as precious as that of ancient traditional culture; second, make the park integral to the urban landscape and open to the public, free of

customary fees for local citizens and tourists; third, establish a new aesthetic favoring untrimmed and “weedy” native, low-maintenance plants; and, fourth, design the park to aid flood control, adapting it to water level fluctuations.

Shipyard Park was built on the site of an abandoned, polluted, and dilapidated shipyard (erected in the 1950s and bankrupt by 1999) dotted with old docks, cranes, rails, water towers, and machinery. The project shows how landscape architects can turn a derelict site into an attractive and meaningful place with new functional relevance and thus contributes to urban renewal.

Since the park’s lake connects through the Qijiang River to the sea, water levels fluctuate up to 1.1 meters (3½ feet) daily. A network of bridges was constructed at various elevations and integrated with terraced planting beds so that native “weeds” from the alluvial wetland could be grown and visitors could feel a hint of the ocean.

Regulations from the Water Management Bureau required that the river corridor at the east side of the site be expanded from 60 meters to 80 meters (197 to 262 feet) to better manage water flow. This meant that more than ten old banyan trees would have to be cut down. In order to save the mature trees, a 20-meter-wide (66 feet) parallel ditch was dug on the other side of the trees, leaving them intact.

Since remnant rusty docks and machinery were largely a nuisance for local residents, three approaches were taken to artistically and ecologically dramatize the spirit of the site using preservation, modification, and creation of new forms. Native habitats, water, and cultural elements were preserved as found; existing structures, materials, and forms were reused for new functions.

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Vegetation along the old lake shore was preserved and modified, as were the rails, water towers, and dilapidated machines.

New forms included a network of straight paths and green boxes (using fig trees as living walls), and a large red box that dramatizes the character of the site. Functionalism is evident in the network of paths linking key locations and exits, in the reuse of dock structures to provide tea and park services, in the light tower made from a former water tower, and in the paved areas under trees where tai chi can be practiced.

This park is environmentally friendly, educational, and full of cultural and historical meanings. It calls people to pay attention to previously neglected culture and history.

It is for and about the common people, and asserts an environmental ethic that weeds are beautiful.

1 Kong jian Yu and Mary G. Padua, “China’s Cosmetic Cities: Urban Fever and Superficiality,” Landscape Research 32:2 (2007), pp. 255–272.

2 Kong jian Yu and Dihua Li, A Path to Urban Landscape: Talks to Mayors (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2003). Published only in Chinese as 城市景观之路 : 与市长们交流 .

3 Kong jian Yu, “The Culture That Has Been Ignored and the Beauty of Weeds—The Shipyard Park, Zhongshan City,” New Architecture 5 (2001), pp. 17–20; see also Kong jian Yu and Pang Wei, The Culture Being Ignored and the Beauty of Weeds—The Regenerative Design of an Industrial Site: The Zhongshan Shipyard Park (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2003). Published only in Chinese as 足下文化与野草之美 : 中山岐江公园 .

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100 m 1

1 The master plan: Based on the existing natural and

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Red box

11 Dock

21 Terraced bank planted with

industrial landscape “canvas,” a road all around the

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Fog fountain square

12 Light tower (reuse of water tower)

park and a network of paths was overlaid. The paths are

3 Hedge

13 Skeleton tower

22 Gate structure at south entrance

straight connections between the entrance and interest-

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14 Playground on the old boat

23 Water edge

ing spots, and this network makes the Shipyard Park a

5 Sculpture

15 Tea house

24 Ring road

complete contrast with traditional Chinese gardens, where

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Yacht club

16 Swimming pool

25 Northwest entrance

meandering and twisting and view breaking are guiding

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Parking lot

17 Pavilion (polymer tent)

principles. This “urban” path network crosses the

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Boating service facilities

18 Fountain

boundary between the city and the park, and makes land-

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Terraced bridges

19 Island

scape an integral part of the urban fabric.

10 Bridge

Column matrix

20 Bridge/floodgate

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native grasses

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2 The park in year 2010 seen from a newly built five-star

4 The “green box” made of Ficus hedge rows are repre-

hotel at the north side. Note the growth of vegetation as

sentations of and have the same spatial dimensions as the

well as the city surrounding the park, which became the

dormitories that once accommodated collective factory work-

catalyst of urban development in this area.

ers on the site. Green boxes are used to create a sense of exploration, when people walk or jog along the straight paths

3 Zhongshan Shipyard Park: On the site was a lake with

that cut through the boxes. They also create semi-private

a muddy waterfront full of debris.

space for couples and groups to enjoy.

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ZHONGSHAN SHIPYARD PARK

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ANTJE STOKMAN

FIASCOES OF CHINESE URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND TURENSCAPE’S ALTERNATIVES How a society shapes its landscapes is, of course, an expression of how its people deal with one another and with nature. Traveling around contemporary China, tourists admire the uniqueness of landscapes as diverse as the vast country’s climate zones, soils, topographies, and cultures. These landscapes—among them rice terraces, mountain terrains, and canals—were shaped by local people for centuries based on their understanding of the land’s unique conditions. To achieve high agricultural productivity within fragile landscapes that are difficult to cultivate and maintain, they linked their cultivation and urbanization patterns closely to the logic of each site’s geography, topography, hydrology, climate, and ecology. Complex human land alterations like terraced rice paddies trace and enforce the gradients of natural topography. Responsiveness to specific site conditions is an essential skill for farmers. Traditional vernacular landscapes are popular tourist sites because they reveal landscape-specific land-cultivation processes, like the flow of water guided by irrigation systems, or planting and harvesting activities that correspond with the growth cycles of crops.

north-south orientation of cities and buildings is essential to the Chinese. This is often annoying to foreign architects. Apartments with a different orientation are usually sold at discounted prices, and this makes Western building block typologies difficult to implement successfully.

STANDARD FIASCOES Chinese cities have become similar to each other.

In fact, they have become so similar that I myself do not know which one is which.

Xiadong Wang 1

Despite this history, almost all contemporary Chinese urban landscapes have taken a lamentable turn: They look the same, from planning and architecture to planting style and even plants, no matter what the climate, topography, water, or soil conditions may be.

In contrast to the slow development of the countryside, the growth of Chinese urban landscapes during the last two decades has been a breakneck comprehensive structural and cultural transformation promoted by the central government and its planners, architects, and landscape architects as “city beautification”—a “green leap forward” to decoratively vegetate the city in ignorance and defiance of the constraints of nature and of peasants’ time-tested practices.

A deeply rooted biocentric perspective can still be experienced in modern China. When asking for directions in a city, Westerners hear the Chinese guide them by the orientation of the planet: north, south, east, and west.

But Westerners find it hard to use that information without having tools like a compass or a map. The feng shui

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dyked with concrete (as they have been in Changde in Hunan Province). Nature is reduced to an abused servant of culture. In their need to present landscape as controlled, the engineers do not respond to the existing natural and other unique features of a place. Processes and patterns such as changing water levels, the formmaking effects of water movement, and water-adapted vegetation are not integrated into design but rather suppressed by superimposed forms and structures.

The vernacular Chinese landscape: rice paddies on terraces yielding to topography, a perfect balance of the human and the natural. Yunnan, 2006.

Two ethical and symbolic concepts of nature and landscape are colliding: The central government’s belief that cities must be saved from “backward” cultural values and made “beautiful” and “modern,” and the traditional ethic of trying to work with nature, maintain fragile ecosystems, and seek safety and comfort in unstable terrain and difficult climates. The Chinese “City Beautiful Movement” modernization campaign has several detrimental effects. Constructed landscapes are high-maintenance, use excessive energy, and consume much water, reducing the energy and water available for industrialization and agriculture (to the extent that, for instance, electrical supply in some regions must now and then be cut off). Ground water tables are sinking, landscapes have high water runoff rates, water levels fluctuate in extremes, and rivers are often dry yet flood after rainfalls. According to Pan Yue, the Chinese Vice Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the area of habitable land in China was halved in the last fifty years due to soil erosion and water loss. One third of China’s landmass is affected by acid rain. More than 300 million rural residents have no access to clean drinking water. One third of urban residents breathe heavily polluted air. 2 The public debate about these severe problems is largely confined to consideration of industrial pollution, while the huge environmental cost of constructing modern cities and urban landscapes is usually suppressed. The negative consequences of dirty smoke rising over factories and polluted waters flowing into rivers are easy to recognize. What can be done? Develop and modernize, of course. However, the more developed the Chinese cities become, the “cleaner” and the more “beautiful” their urban environment appears, the more they destroy their natural resource bases.

The traditional productive terraced landscape becomes overwhelmed by the huge, artificial, imposed landscape of modern urbanization. Dalian, 2004.

This urban development approach treats nature as an enemy that can only be defeated by increasingly aggressive cosmetic and technological interventions. Engineers devise infrastructure projects, and their “products” are kept as visually recessive as possible so that urban and landscape designers can work on a generic empty canvas and apply uniform aesthetic and spatial formulae to screen and “beautify” roads, concrete riverbanks, and dykes with a veneer of exchangeable elements such as stones and statues, benches and fences, and topiary shrubs and flowerpots. Anything seems possible in the pursuit of a modern city image. If a hill is in the way, it can be removed (as one was in Dalian Software Park, Liaoning). If a hill is needed for the design, it can be constructed (as one was in Beijing´s Olympic Park). If lakes are needed for a new city, they will be created (as they have been for the residential communities along the dried-out Chaobai River in Beijing). If the landscape is too wet, rivers will be channelized and

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GO PRODUCTIVE: THE RICE CAMPUS OF SHENYANG JIANZHU UNIVERSITY SHENYANG, LIAONING PROVINCE, CHINA, 2004

This project demonstrates how agricultural landscape can become part of the urbanized environment and how cultural identity can be created through an ordinary agricultural landscape.

Kong jian Yu believes that his projects should be “productive” in as many ways as possible: yielding crops, promoting biodiversity, providing species habitat, and more.

Much of this conviction stems from his boyhood experience of severe food shortages in his homeland and his adult awareness of food scarcities in many areas of the globe.

In his essay “The Good Earth Recovered,” he wrote: “In the past twelve years, from 1996 to 2008, China has ceded 7 percent of her agricultural land to urban development. … Each year more than 10 million peasants across China leave their rural homes searching for a ‘better’ life in the city, leaving millions of hectares of fertile land uncultivated or eagerly selling it off for development and industrial use. Currently, China owns only 10 percent of the world’s arable land but must feed 20 percent of the world’s population. With China’s arable land per capita at approximately 40 percent of the world average, the entire country is on the brink of a land and food crisis.”1 As a farmer, he views preserving the landscape and making it productive as a moral imperative. Productivity creates new aesthetic values: Beauty without usefulness now seems ugly, and the most thoroughly useful seems beautiful.

It is in the context of contemporary China’s endless creation of merely ornamental landscapes that Yu designed the rice campus of Shenyang Jianzhu University. This project asserts that landscape architects should

rebuild the connection between the earth and the people—especially the younger generation estranged from the land because of urbanization—and raise awareness of the food crisis. This working landscape is an example of Yu’s “big foot” aesthetics—beautiful by being productive.

In March 2002, the city of Shenyang in northern China commissioned the landscape architect to create a suburban campus for Shenyang Jianzhu University. Originally located downtown, the university was established in 1948 and played an important role in educating architects and civil engineers.

But after a dramatic national surge in interest in architecture, enrollment at the school ballooned, causing congestion and overcrowding. After much deliberation, the school decided that the best solution was to move the entire campus to the suburbs. This project is the crop-field portion of the campus at its southwest side. Only about one US dollar per square meter (0.09 US dollar per square foot) was allocated for landscaping. Most of the budget was set aside for the design and construction of new university buildings. The university required that the design be developed and implemented within just one year.

The site for the proposed campus was originally a field that produced the famous “Northeast Rice,” rice known for its high quality stemming from the cool climate and long growing season (a single crop of rice in Liaoning Province is grown in 135 days, but in southern China in only 100 days.) The soil quality was good, but a new irrigation system was needed; for this Yu designed a storm water collecting system and a reflecting pond to store the rainwater. This pond is an

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attractive landscape feature with native wild grass growing in abundance and requiring little maintenance.

The design uses rice, wheat, and other crops, as well as native plants, to keep the landscape productive while fulfilling its new roles of providing an environment for learning and usable outdoor space. The rice paddy spans the landscape, has small open sitting platforms, and is completely functional with its own irrigation system. Other native crops like buckwheat grow in rotation across the campus annually. Native plants line pathways.

The productive aspect of the landscape draws students and faculty into dialogue about sustainable development and food production. By situating the architecture school within a rice paddy, the design makes agriculture become easily understandable to all on campus. Students participate in crop management, planting, and harvesting. Both farming and observing the plants’ natural processes offer educational opportunities.

The rice produced on the campus is harvested and distributed as “Golden Rice,” serving as a keepsake for visitors to the school and a source of identity and pride for the young suburban campus. The wide distribution of Golden Rice has the potential to raise awareness of new hybrid landscape solutions combining agriculture with social space.

1 Kong jian Yu, “The Good Earth Recovered,” in Donata Valentien, ed., Wiederkehr der Landschaft/Return of Landscape (Berlin: Jovis Publishers, 2010), pp. 225–233.

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1

Central pond

1  Master plan of the campus rice field: Storm water is col-

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Dry crop area

lected to create a reflecting pond that becomes the water

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Rice fields

source for irrigating the rice paddies. A path network was laid

4 Library

out allowing faculty and students to access and cross the

5 Laboratory

paddies while keeping them a working agricultural field.

6 Classroom

The main paths are oriented north-south so that trees can be

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Covered corridor

planted without creating major shadow over the crops while

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Student dormitory

providing comfortable shaded pedestrian corridors. Cul-de-sac

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University library

platforms are distributed in the fields as private study spaces

10 Cafeteria

for groups of students to use under the shade of canopy trees.

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50

100 m

1

2

2 A bird’s eye view of the productive campus: productive crops (rice, wheat, and buckwheat) create the campus landscape. The paths across the fields are connections between different functional buildings (between student dormitories to classrooms and laboratories).

3 Spring: The rice paddies are filled with water, and rice seedlings are ready for transplanting. Groups of students are gathered for the rice planting festival.

3

THE RICE CAMPUS OF SHENYANG JIANZHU UNIVERSITY

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4 In the rice paddies cul-de-sac study platforms and seats are distributed for students to use. A tree provides shade in the hot summer.

5 The north-south paths are lined with poplar trees that cast attractive shadows on the paths but not on the productive fields.

5

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WILLIAM S. SAUNDERS

THE BOY WHO READ BOOKS RIDING A WATER BUFFALO The story of Kongjian Yu’s journey from farming in a remote Chinese village to international preeminence in landscape architecture traces an extraordinary odyssey.

But it also helps us understand the sources of his design values, passions, and modes.

his family had once enjoyed. During his childhood, he lived with his parents and siblings in one third of a two-story courtyard house. Four people slept to a room, his sister and mother on one bed, he and his father on another. His parents were illiterate. During the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1961), tens of millions of Chinese died of starvation. Yu’s family also had too little food, and his older brother and sister suffered the consequences in poor health.

He was born in 1963, growing up in a village of five hundred people communally raising crops and livestock. That, as a boy during the 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution, Yu saw his mother and father stripped of their dignity and possessions for being from well-off, land-owning families helps explain his vast ambition.

He grew up near an enchanting forest and a fish-filled creek, only to see the forest cut down and the creek become too polluted to support life. This helps explain the depth of his commitment to recreating and protecting natural abundance. He suffered social ostracism in the countryside for having wealthy ancestors and then for being a “country bumpkin” when he made it to the big city. This helps us understand his conviction that parks are to be enjoyed by all ranks of people. He loved farming and was proud that his commune used every square meter of its land productively. This helps explain his revulsion to landscapes that are “merely” ornamental. He learned how to deploy scarce water resources and cultivate crops in ways that ensured their survival.

And this helps us understand his will to create parks that are low-maintenance and “productive.”

View of Yu’s boyhood village, Dongyu, with surrounding rice paddies and harvested rice piles, 2001.

But beyond all this, his extraordinarily challenging coming-of-age—so foreign to Western landscape architects—is moving for its elemental human content. Yu knew only through storytelling of the modest privilege

Lane in Dongyu, with Yu’s house the third on the right, 2003.

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to offer more confessions. For ten years, peasant boys cursed and threw stones at him for being from a “bad family.” In school, he was forced to write “confessions” criticizing his parents. His teachers resented his intelligence. He was not allowed to attend middle school.

When Yu was seven, his rebellious brother wrote a letter of complaint to the government. As a result he was thrown in jail, but before long he ran away, hopping on a train to another province. The rest of the family heard nothing from him and worried that he had died.

He returned after a year and was convicted as anti-revolutionary and faced beatings and public humiliation.

The courtyard of Yu’s house in Dongyu, shared with his father’s brothers, 2003.

Yu’s village, Dongyu, was originally settled by an ancestor nineteen generations before Kongjian’s birth and is named for that ancestor. The village is about 10 kilo­ meters (6.3 miles) from the town of Jinhua (now a city of four million and a major center for grain production) in the heart of Zhejiang Province, a region famous for its scenic mountain waters, rich vernacular architecture, and intellectually and commercially successful people.1 But Kongjian knew nothing of this wider reality. If, once or twice a year, he went to Jinhua with his father to sell farm produce, the sale was the sole goal of their trip to the town. His family knew nothing of Beijing and Shanghai.

Yu says no one in the family seems to have been psychologically crushed by all this. Until he was thirteen, these conditions represented “normal life” for him; they were shared by the other “bad families.” Once or twice, he heard quiet crying at night. His mother would complain about the bad feng shui that must have come down through her husband’s family. The father’s eyes welled with tears when his son ran away to an unknown fate. When Kongjian and a peasant friend broke a water vessel in school, Yu remembers indignantly the unfairness of being punished with a much larger fine.

One thing that kept up the spirits of Yu and his family were his exceptional athletic abilities in track and field—in situations in which cheating and bias could not affect success, he won many championships.

In 1966, when Kongjian was three years old, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, meant to root out capitalism, industrialize the country, and bring power to the poor. One night the local people took Kongjian and his family to the playground of the elementary school to hold them with the other “bad families.” His parents had overnight become enemies of the state, their house was ransacked, and their possessions (even wedding rings) were taken. They were jailed in a buffalo pen with about twenty other people for a month.

He and his siblings were allowed to stay at home; to assist their parents’ survival, his sister cooked meals and Kongjian carried them through the village to hand to his parents through a window. Finally released from the pen, his mother and father were forced to sweep the village streets before dawn, wear belittling signs, and make public confessions, sometimes enduring beatings. Once Yu saw his parents dangled for many minutes from poles by their tied hands and feet being told

During all this hardship, nature and agriculture provided Yu’s consolation and escape. From the front of his house, he gazed southward at a pine forest 500 meters (550 yards) away beyond the rice paddies and ponds. It frightened and enthralled him. Now and then, he would see wolves emerging from it. The elders would gather under giant shade trees on hot summer evenings and tell tales of mythological beasts and ancestors buried in that forest. Not until he was seven did Yu muster the courage to accompany his brother there. When he did, he found “an Eden”—birds, animals, flowers, streams, and plants he had never seen. Before long he would go regularly, sometimes alone, to gather mushrooms, grass for his rabbits and sheep, wood for fires, water weeds for his pigs, and weasels for the family dinner.

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MAKE FRIENDS WITH FLOODS: THE FLOATING GARDENS OF YONGNING RIVER PARK TAIZHOU, CHINA, 2004 In 2006, after graduating from Harvard, Kongjian Yu was invited to lecture at various universities, including Shenzhen in the south, and Beijing and Tsinghua in the north. Taking the train from Shenzhen to Beijing and riding bicycles in these cities, he was stunned by the enormous urbanization taking place and the devastation of water systems and fertile land.

He then made up his mind to return to China to help stem the tide of wanton destruction.

In his essay “Crying Mother River,”1 Yu poured out his lament: “South Rivers, North Rivers, all my beloved Mother Rivers, are now crying: My cruel children, why are you binding my feminine body with high dams? Flowing is my instinct; spreading is my life. From the snowy mountains and plateaus to forests and valleys, from plains and footpaths to lakes and beaches, I give oxygen and mineral nutrition. Using my flow, plants can disperse and thrive, and wild animals can migrate.

“I used to have shoals and deep pools where water played sweet music. When the spring flood water came, my bends and curves slowed its rush so it could sink into the earth and be stored abundantly underground, to be released later to support life.

I once held fresh and tender grasses on my fertile skin and sheltered fish and mussels.

I once nurtured arrowheads and reeds, which grew in my deep hollows, where frogs sang at dawn and nightfall. …

“My shameless and tasteless children! You dislike my grass and shrubs? You dislike my curling shape and natural simplicity? You rape me with concrete and granite and cover the ground with Italy’s tiles, Netherlands’s flowers, and America’s lawns, robbing me of my ancient plant companions ... North man and South man…do you remember me, your Mother River?”

Following his return to China, Yu has voiced this lament all over the nation in lectures and television shows. He is committed to show that rivers can meet the functional and spiritual

needs of humans. Yongning River Park demonstrates how ecological design can accommodate both floods and urban development.

In July 2002, the Taizhou government asked Turenscape to design a 21 hectare (51 acre) park along the Yongning River.

At that time, most of the riverbank was reinforced with concrete. The project brief was to develop an appealing design concept while providing an alternative flood control and storm water management system.

The project challenges were many. In China’s urbanization process, most rivers are subjected to single-minded flood control based on concrete-heavy engineering and damming. A first task was to persuade the local authority to stop channelizing the river, a practice expensive and ecologically destructive. A second major goal of the design was to develop and demonstrate an alternative flood control and storm water management approach that can be used throughout China.

And a third challenge was to design a functioning park that, unlike a bird sanctuary that when flooded just serves wildlife, is still accessible in high water conditions.

For resolving these challenges and goals, the park has two layers: a natural matrix that is overlapped by a human matrix, the “floating gardens.” The natural matrix is formed chiefly through a wetland and vegetation system designed to receive flood water and provide wildlife habitat. Above this matrix float the gardens of humanity, composed of a geometrically regular tree matrix, a path network, and a matrix of “story boxes.” Storm water analysis was used to establish flood levels and patterns for five-, twenty-, and fiftyyear flood events which became the basis for designing the wetland system to enable flood control and water management. Composed of a restored riparian wetland along the flood plain and a man-made lake outside the riverbank that runs parallel to the river, the park is covered with native plant communities.

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During the rainy season, both the riparian wetland and the inner man-made lake adapt to high water levels. During the dry season, the lake still holds retained water and is filled by water piped in from an inlet in the upper river.

Year-round, water is accessible to park users. Native wetland plants, trees, and bamboo are massed along the riverbank and used throughout the park not only to ensure successful establishment of the vegetation but also to promote continuity of the design with the surrounding ecosystem. The upper “human” layer floats above the natural matrix and includes groves of a neglected native tree, the Chinese redwood.

A network of paths extends from the surrounding urban fabric to the park. Punctuating the landscape at strategically placed points is a matrix of nine “story boxes,” each 9 by 9 meters (30 by 30 feet), alluding to the culture and history of the native land and people. The stories are about rice, fish, crafts, Taoism, stone, mountains, water, citrus, and martial arts. In the box about stone, a native yellow rock, for which the Huangyan district of Taizhou is named, is displayed in a yellow box. Using the box as a frame, the normal native rock becomes a special feature, and the vernacular landscape element is celebrated. For the story box about rice, a patch of tall wetland grass was grown in a box, floating above the wetland; a path runs through the box, recalling the narrow path of a rice paddy. Martial arts are another cultural heritage of this region, so a matrix of red poles was installed in which people can practice those disciplines. In front of each story box, a poem is inscribed on a rock.

The boxes create human scale in the large landscape.

1 Kong jian Yu, “Crying Mother River,” in The Road to Urban Landscape: Talks to Mayors (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2003). Published only in Chinese as 城市景观之路 : 与市长们交流 .

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8  The ecologically restored riparian wetland, conducive to the natural processes of flooding and serving as habitat for native species, is also accessible to people. Native grasses were used to consolidate the riverbank and to create an attractive setting for visitors.

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THE FLOATING GARDENS OF YONGNING RIVER PARK

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THE FLOATING GARDENS OF YONGNING RIVER PARK

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16 This red box at the cross section of two paths, one of the ten “story boxes,” draws attention to the widely distributed and barely noticed native plant Nippon lily (Rohdea japonica), featured in the enclosed setting, and celebrates and dramatizes the beauty of its commonness.

17 One of the lanes that is part of the path network is lined with Chinese redwoods.

18 The floating plaza: pavement above a man-made wetland.

19 This lane is planted with bamboo.

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20 Groves of native Chinese tallow trees (Sapium sebiferum) were planted on the earth dyke.

21 An installation of columns tells the story of martial art (gong fu), for which the Huangyan district is famous.

The columns allow water to drain during the flooding season and create a lively atmosphere for visitors.

The native grasses and the designed art work installed on the riparian plain pose a strong contrast.

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THE FLOATING GARDENS OF YONGNING RIVER PARK

TREAD LIGHTLY: RED RIBBON PARK QINHUANGDAO, HEBEI PROVINCE, CHINA, 2007

Kongjian Yu believes that most contemporary designed landscapes are too costly, both financially and environmentally, especially in China.1 His goal is to remedy this and establish models to show how minimal interventions can make urban landscapes functional, pleasant, and socially vibrant for everyone.

He also believes that traditional Chinese garden design does not address important environmental and ecological challenges, and he seeks to create landscapes that he defines with some key terms: the “new vernacular,” 2 the “beauty of weeds,” 3 “big foot aesthetics,” and “ecological minimalism.” 4 Visible against a background of natural terrain and vegetation in this Qinhuangdao park is the Red Ribbon, a fiberglass structure that extends 500 meters (547 yards) through the landscape. It integrates lighting, seating, environmental interpretation, and orientation into its sinuous red form. While preserving as much of the natural river corridor as possible, the project demonstrates how a minimal design solution can achieve dramatic improvement in the landscape.

The park is located on the Tanghe River at the eastern urban fringe of Qinhuangdao, a northern Chinese coastal city. The following site conditions presented both opportunities and challenges for the design:­­ › Good ecological circumstances: The site was covered with lush and diverse native vegetation, providing varied habitats for a range of species. › Unkempt and deserted land: Located at the edge of a coastal city, the site was a garbage dump with a deserted shantytown and old, unused irrigation infrastructure such as ditches and dykes.

› Potential safety and accessibility problems: Covered with dense vegetation, the site was virtually inaccessible, and combined with poor lines of sight, this made it unsafe for public use. › Functional demands: After the arrival of nearby urban sprawl, the site was developed to serve new communities for recreation, including fishing, swimming, and jogging. › Development pressure: The lower reaches of the Tanghe River had already been channelized, and a similar treatment was likely at the site of the park. The natural river corridor would probably have been replaced with concrete embankments and ornamental flowerbeds.

environmental information. White, yellow, purple, and blue perennial flower gardens appear as a patchwork over the formerly desolate fields.

The vibrant color of the Red Ribbon adds brightness to the densely vegetated site, links the diverse natural vegetation and the four flower gardens, and provides a structural device that reorganizes the formerly unkempt and inaccessible area. The site has been dramatically urbanized and modernized, in tune with local residents’ desires, while keeping the ecological processes on the site intact.

1 Kong jian Yu and Dihua Li, The Road to Urban Landscape: Talks to Mayors (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2003). Published only in Chinese as 城市景观 之路 : 与市长们交流 ; and Kong jian Yu and Mary G. Padua, “China’s Cosmetic Cities: Urban Fever and Superficiality,”

The major design challenge was to protect the natural habitat along the river while creating new opportunities for recreation and environmental education.

The Red Ribbon was designed to fit its setting of green vegetation and blue water, curving with the terrain. It integrates a boardwalk, seating, and lighting; lit from the inside, it glows red at night. It is 60 centimeters (24 inches) high, and it varies in width from 30 to 150 centimeters (11 to 59 inches).

Ground level crossings for small animals are built into the Ribbon. Creating an abstract pattern on the top of the Red Ribbon, strategically placed holes hold lights or allow various grasses from the site to grow up through the surface.

Five pavilions in the shape of clouds are distributed along the Red Ribbon. These provide protection from harsh sunlight, opportunities for social gatherings, visual focal points, and plaques that provide interpretive

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Landscape Research 32:2 (2007), pp. 225–249.

2 Kong jian Yu and Birgit Linder, “Vernacular Cities and Vernacular Landscapes: The Legacy of the May Fourth Movement in Chinese Landscape Architecture,” in Kong jian Yu and Mary Padua, eds., The Art of Survival: Recovering Landscape Architecture (Mulgrave, Victoria: Images Publishing, and Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2006), pp. 31–32.

3 Kong jian Yu and Wei Pang, The Culture Being Ignored and the Beauty of Weeds: The Regenerative Design of an Industrial Site—The Zhongshan Shipyard Park (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2003). Published only in Chinese as 足下文化与野草之美 : 中山岐江公园 .

4 “Interview with Kong jian Yu,” American Society of Landscape Architects 2008, http://www.asla.org/contentdetail.aspx?id=20124.

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11. reinforced walls 150 x 150 mm 10 Square steelconcrete tubes,

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RED RIBBON PARK

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Section of the Red Ribbon.

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The existing site was dramatically urbanized and modern-

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18, 19 The Red Ribbon, seen in winter, as it winds through the remnant seedlings of a former tree nursery.

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TRANSFORMING A WORKING LANDSCAPE: QINHUANGDAO FOREST PARK QINHUANGDAO, HEBEI PROVINCE, CHINA, 2011

Minimal inter ventions, productive land scapes, and the integration of contemporary design with nature’s messiness are some of the most characteristic features in Kongjian Yu’s projects that are of particular relevance in the Qinhuangdao Forest Park.

With a minimal intervention, an ordinary tree plantation started in the 1950s and serving as a windbreak on an abandoned farm has been transformed into a lively urban park that will provide multiple ecosystem services including food production and storm water management. It will also serve as a habitat for a diverse flora and fauna and provide recreational and aesthetically pleasurable experiences for its visitors.

The Qinhuangdao Forest Park, on the west coast of the Bohai Sea, is located in between two densely populated districts of Qinhuang­ dao, a renowned beachside tourist destination in northern China. The whole area was afforested in the 1950s to form a windbreak, transforming coastal sand dunes into a green wedge for the city that also protected the coastal land and railroad from erosion by the sea. It was an uninteresting tree plantation dominated by fast-growing trees, including poplar (Populus tomentosa and Populus Canadensis) and black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia). Dotting the Forest Park are fish ponds and rice paddies, most of which have been abandoned since this area was designated as a national forest park in 1993.

The fish ponds and agricultural areas were made into functional public spaces. The windbreak plantation was made porous and universally accessible for visitors.

The design approach makes use of what landscape architects call “landscape acupuncture”: the identification of critical points and positions and the use of minimal interventions to dramatically change the landscape.

These interventions comprised the following four measures: 1. The 5 hectares (12 acres) of existing farmland, used for the production of rice and other crops, were transformed into urban farmland that will involve the local communities in the agricultural production process. A skywalk and boardwalk were built at the edge of the farm, allowing visitors to observe the working landscape in all seasons.

2. The abandoned fish farms were used for the construction of wetlands that will catch storm water and enrich biodiversity in the park. Lotuses and various wetland plants were planted for their beauty. Some fish ponds are made accessible by boardwalks and platforms, and provide opportunities for sport fishing in the park.

3. The forest landscape was enriched by the introduction of self-reproductive wildflowers in its gaps and along the paths.

4. A network of footpaths and boardwalks leads visitors through the park. These are designed to link various types of habitats.

Pavilions and platforms at strategic places give the park identity and points of orientation.

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0

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Site plan.

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Alkali drainage

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Fish pond transformed with a resting deck

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10 Landscape lake 11 Service facilities 12 Existing pear orchard preserved 13 Lotus pond 14 Administration building 15 Xinhe River 16 Wetland park 17 Elevated skywalk

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4 The former rice farm has been transformed into an urban park with an elevated skywalk above the edge of the wetlands.

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QINHUANGDAO FOREST PARK

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The skywalk allows visitors to walk through the forest

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edge smoothed, R = 2.5 mm, rotated 90 degrees

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wood board, 5 mm gap between boards

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centers, 50 x 5 mm steel angle fastener

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10 60 mm white-coated steel beam 11 350 x 350 mm white-coated wide-flange steel column 12 White LED lighting

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LET NATURE DO HER WORK: THE ADAPTATION PALETTES OF QIAOYUAN WETLAND PARK TIANJIN, CHINA, 2008

Urban green space is supposed to provide psychological and physical benefits. The reality of many traditional ornamental urban parks, however—particularly those built in the last twenty years in China—is that they create economic and environmental burdens because of their high maintenance costs and water and energy consumption.

Qiao­y uan Wetland Park implicitly asserts that the beauty of wild grass landscapes has been undervalued, especially in terms of the sustainable services they provide. Concrete channelization of streams and rivers in China has resulted in the loss of ground water supplies. Native plants have been replaced with swaths of ornamentals that suppress biodiversity. It is critical to recover landscape as a living ecosystem that has the ability to adapt, change, and provide ecosystem services.

In the northern coastal city of Tianjin, a deserted shooting range, then used as a garbage dump and drainage sink for urban storm water, has been transformed into a low-maintenance urban park by changing its landform and allowing the natural processes of plant community adaptation and evolution to take place. The park provides diverse natural resources for the city, including retaining and purifying storm water, improving the soil, offering opportunities for environmental education, and creating pleasurable aesthetic experiences.

The regional landscape is flat and was once rich in wetlands and salt marshes that have

now been mostly destroyed through decades of urban development and infrastructure construction. The site was heavily polluted, littered, and surrounded with slums and rickety temporary structures. The soil was saline and alkaline. Densely populated at the south and east boundaries, the site is bounded on the west and north sides by a highway and an overpass. In early 2006, in response to residents’ call for improvement of the site, the municipal government commissioned the task of an immediate transformation.

Inspired by the adaptive vegetation communities that once dotted the landscape in this region, the new park concept is known as “The Adaptation Palettes,” since the park is designed to let nature do her work with minimal management. Twenty-one pond depressions were constructed, varying from 10 to 40 meters (30 to 130 feet) in diameter and from 1 to 5 meters (3 to 16 feet) in elevation above sea level. Some depressions are below ground level and some are above, within mounds.

Through the seasons’ evolution, patches of different species of the regional waterand alkaline-sensitive vegetation grow in correspondence to the conditions of the individual depressions. Though it is too difficult to grow trees in the saline-alkaline soil, the ground cover and wetland vegetation are richly diverse and vary in response to subtle changes in the water table and pH values.

Initially seeds of mixed plant species were

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sowed in the varied habitats to start the vegetation; other native species were allowed to grow spontaneously wherever this was suitable.

In the rainy season and due to the high ground water, some depressions have turned into ponds, some into wetlands, and some into seasonal pools; some stay dry. Thanks to the washing effect of seasonal rain, the saline-alkaline soil of the dry depressions has improved, while nutrients have been deposited in the deeper ponds that catch storm water runoff.

Within some of the depressions are wooden platforms that allow visitors to sit in the middle of the vegetation patches. A network of red asphalt paths weaves through the palettes.

Along the paths are environmental interpretation signage that offer descriptions of natural patterns, processes, and native species.

The park achieved its goals within two years. Storm water is retained in the depressions; diverse water-sensitive communities have evolved. Seasonal changes in plant species occur and integrate with the beauty of the “messy” native plant landscape. In the first two months of its opening, from October to November 2008, about 200,000 people visited the park; hundreds still visit every day.

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3 Summer view: deep ponds with permanent water can be recognized in the foreground and shallow, seasonal ponds are in the background.

4 The design concept for “The Adaptation Palettes”: Let nature do her work. Here the adaptation process is visualized in habitat types sensitive to water and soil pH values. They were inspired by the regional landscape with the same kinds of patches.

5 Fall landscape, with deep ponds in the foreground.

6 Bird’s eye view of the park in the winter from the southwest corner showing the diverse patchwork landscape of pond depressions occupied by varying plant communities.

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7 An environmental interpretation board sits by a deep water pond with water lilies and Chinese fountain grass (Pennisetum alopecuroides) and other native grasses on the shore.

8 One of the shallow water ponds dominated by reed community at the water edge create a quiet and romantic place in the middle of the park.

9 The same pond as in ill. 7 in the fall.

10 Plans and construction details of this pond.

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THE ADAPTATION PALETTES OF QIAOYUAN WETLAND PARK

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GATHER PEOPLE: BRIDGED GARDENS TIANJIN, TIANJIN PROVINCE, CHINA, 2008 The projects Bridged Gardens, Dujiangyan Square, Long Sleeve Skywalk, and Chinatown Park in Boston are grouped together in this book because their focus is more on public place than on ecology. They strive to achieve human-scaled spaces rich with natural elements. These spaces stand in opposition to the bloated and inhuman monumentality of many recent Chinese large hard-surface squares, cut off from nature’s beneficence.

In “Return of the Spirit: Urban Landscape Calling for Human Space” Kongjian Yu and Dihua Li explore what makes space human, as is apparent from the example of daily life among Hani people in Yunnan Province: “Under enormous shade trees, boys and girls play with total abandon. A massive tree stands silently at the intersection of two ridges on a field with a small creek running through it, providing a perfect venue for young lovers to confide in each other in the soft glow of moonlight. The village well with its stone benches is a gathering space where women fetch water and wash clothes while work-worn men sit comfortably with bamboo opium pipes in one hand.”1 Yu and Li go on to say that in “good” public places people can talk, share in joyful celebration, and feel hope and belonging. Without human activity, story, and spirit, public places lose their meaning. Designers must imagine people’s lives from within: Human beings need communication, for they are afraid of being alone. They need to exercise and have places to rest, to take ownership of their surroundings, to pursue things around them but also to find places of shelter. They need to feel both safe and challenged. People prefer walking on smooth roads, but they also seek the unexpected—a river, a wild animal, a bridge.

Yu and Li continue: People need to love and be concerned about others. To understand the lifestyles, habits, and values of inhabitants, you must experience their traditions and customs. It is only when you have learned a great deal about the local people’s lives that you can design public spaces.

Listen to them and explore the natural and

social history of the site. Supporting the local spirit is the motivation of the design.

Urban landscapes should be the projection of human desires and ideals.

In the northern coastal city of Tianjin, a series of differently designed gardens form an L-shaped linear open space, located along a small man-made lake between the city and the large Qiaoyuan Wetland Park. The park and the Bridged Gardens, completed in 2007 and 2008, were designed to improve local water and soil conditions, to create an environment that celebrated the local culture and its landscapes, and to provide recreational opportunities for the surrounding population of more than 10 million people.

This open space presented challenges and opportunities: How could the new landscape improve the site’s poor soil and water conditions? How could the city be connected to nature? How could a boring, flat landscape be made interesting?

Bridged Gardens combines five areas— Hilled Gardens, City Windows, Sunken Gardens, Terraced Waterfront, and the Skywalk— to create a banded landscape that provides ecological and recreational services as well as aesthetic pleasure. The regional landscape was once rich in wetlands and salt marshes; many were destroyed over decades of urban development and infrastructure construction.

The conventional approach to enabling tree growth, i.e. raising the ground level, would have blocked the view to the water’s edge from the city. So the landscape architect used a cut-and-fill strategy and excavated the soil from the former fish pond to create a raised ground suitable for trees to grow. This excavation also allowed expanding and connecting the preexisting ponds and swales into a linear lake. The excavated soil was used to make eleven terraced mounds, which were then bridged with the Skywalk. A series of City Windows were created between these terraces, relinking the city with nature: From the city one can see through the Windows to the Sunken Gardens, and from the Gardens one can look back to the city.

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In lower-laying areas are the nine Sunken Gardens and at the crests are stepped Hill Gardens connected by the Skywalk, which is a red elevated path intersected by ten observation towers. To allow park users, including the elderly and handicapped, to easily enter the gardens and the Skywalk from the street, the Hilled Gardens gradually slope down to the waterfront.

Both the City Windows and the elevated areas provide views not only to the water (fed by rainwater and a nearby canal) and lower gardens, but also to the man-made wetland beyond. Finally, the continuous red Skywalk links each hilled and sunken garden with separate observation towers, offering fresh perspectives on the wetlands and gardens.

At the waterfront edge, cascading planters hold diverse species. Inclined stone retention walls are constructed with a variety of rocks excavated in the region. The park comes to embody the culture and context through a variety of references to the region.

The nine Sunken Gardens, each measuring 20 by 8 meters (22 by 9 yards), are inspired by the local land conditions: water borders, crop fields, harvested farmlands, flowing rivers, marshes, meadows, and pastures. The landscape architect reinterpreted these patterns with sustainable materials and contemporary designs that allow people to make playful use of the space.

Five meters (5.5 yards) above the main garden level, observation walkways run the length of the site perpendicular to the Skywalk and provide platforms for observation and connection to the various small gardens and the large park beyond. They also afford vistas of the water and the metropolis of Tianjin.

1 “Return of the Spirit: Urban Landscape Calling for Human Space,” in Kong jian Yu and Dihua Li, The Road to Urban Landscape: Talks to Mayors (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2003). Published only in Chinese as 城市景观之路 : 与市长们交流 ; the English translation was provided by Turenscape.

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01. dry stack ore stone 02. yellow sand stone, 300X100X20mm 03. landing stage 04. water level

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The Skywalk, colored in classic Chinese red,

connects the terraces.

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Section through the earthen terraces and the

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Dry stacked stone

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BRIDGED GARDENS

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5 There are eleven terraced mounds, and stepped Corten steel planters on the lakeside of each mound feature one plant species each. Paths run between the lake and the terraces.

6 Raised walkways at the water’s edge create an ecofriendly waterfront, mixing Cartesian geometries with natural growth and allowing people to walk into the wetland and touch the Oriental cattails.

7 A boardwalk by the water frames the native “messy” vegetation dominated by reeds.

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BRIDGED GARDENS

LANDSCAPE AS A LIVING SYSTEM: HOUTAN PARK

SHANGHAI EXPO PARK, SHANGHAI, CHINA, 2009

Water pollution and shortages pose bigger threats to humankind than do future oil shortages. More than thirty years of rapid urbanization and uninformed hydrological engineering for flood control in China have severely damaged China’s water system. For over a decade, Kongjian Yu has been trying to raise awareness of these problems among decision makers through his public lectures and talks to mayors.1 Some 75 percent of surface water (lakes, streams, rivers, etc.) in China is polluted, up to 60 percent of the ground water in metropolitan areas is polluted, and half of China’s coastal wetlands have disappeared in the last fifty years. 2 Some of the largest lakes in China (including Taihu, Dianchi, and Caohu) are so polluted by raw sewage, agricultural runoff, and industrial waste that they can hardly support aquatic animal life. All the major rivers in China—the Yangtze, Yellow, Heilong, Pearl, and more— are equally polluted. This situation has led Yu to call landscape architecture “the art of survival”—the profession best positioned to address water problems holistically.

Yu criticizes water-cleansing processes that separate water from its living environment—particularly the concrete channelizing of rivers—and instead proposes an ecological approach to address surface water pollution in continuous and complete “natural” systems allowing integration with plant life and free flows between water bodies. Water, in his view, should be central to ecosystem services that are productive, regulating, lifecarrying, and culturally nourishing.3 Houtan Park gave Yu a perfect opportunity to demonstrate his holistic approach to designing landscapes as living systems that provide these services. This project has received more

attention and awards worldwide than any other by Turenscape and can be thought of as a prime model for landscape architecture to address water quality and supply as this century’s primary survival issue.

Built on the brownfield of a former industrial site on Shanghai’s Huangpu riverfront, Houtan Park is a regenerative living landscape. The park’s constructed wetlands, flood control measures, reclaimed industrial structures and materials, and urban agriculture are integral components of an overall restorative design strategy to treat polluted river water and recover the degraded waterfront in an aesthetically pleasing way.

The site is a narrow, linear 14 hectare (34.6 acre) band located along the waterfront. Previously owned by a steel factory and a shipyard, this brownfield had few industrial structures remaining, and the site was mainly used as a landfill and as a storage yard for industrial materials. Houtan Park was intended to be an innovative demonstration of ecological values and realities for the 2010 Shanghai Expo. The park was designed to accommodate a large influx of visitors, create a unique space and an unforgettable event, and become a permanent public waterfront park after the Expo.

The first challenge was to restore the degraded environment. The brownfield was littered with industrial and construction debris both above and underground.

The water of the contiguous Huangpu River is highly polluted, with a water quality ranking of Lower Grade V (the lowest grade on a national scale of I to V), unsafe for swimming and recreation and devoid of aquatic life.

The initial design challenge was to transform this landscape into a safe and pleasant public

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space; the second was to improve flood control. The preexisting concrete flood wall on the inland southeast side of the park was designed to protect against a one-thousandyear flood event with a height of 6.7 meters (22 feet). The 2.1 meter (6 feet) daily tidal fluctuation created a muddy and littered shoreline that was rendered inaccessible to the public by the flood wall. A conventional retaining wall would have continued to limit accessibility and would have prevented habitat creation along the water’s edge, so an alternative flood control proposal was necessary.

The third challenge was the site itself: Long and narrow, it is locked between the Huangpu River and an urban expressway, and though it has a continuous 1.7 kilometers (1 mile) along the river, its width ranges between only 30 to 80 meters (100 to 265 feet).

Regenerative design strategies used to transform the site into a living system offer comprehensive ecological services, including food production, flood management, water treatment, and habitat creation. A constructed wetland, 1.7 kilometers long (1 mile) and 5 to 30 meters (16.5 to 100 feet) wide, running the length of the site, was designed to create a reinvigorated waterfront as a living machine to treat some of the contaminated water from the Huangpu River. A cascade wall was used to oxygenate the nutrientrich water, and terraces were installed to create a treatment sequence to remove and retain nutrients, and reduce suspended sediments while offering pleasant experiences to visitors. Various species of wetland plants were selected to absorb various pollutants from the water. Field testing indicated that 2,400 cubic meters (634,000 gallons) of water per day could be improved from Lower

4

5

4, 5 The cascade aerates and cleanses the water from the Huangpu River.

6

Construction section drawing of the

1 2 7.000

cascade wall.

1

Slate gray granite top, 250 x 500 mm

(50mm thick)

6.800

3

6.500 6.250

2 Planter 3

Non-clay brick, 120 mm

4

1:3 cement mortar for 120–150 mm

wide bonded slate-gray schist

5

1:3 cement mortar (including 5 %

water-repellent), 20 mm

6

Waterproof mortar-bonded rubble

retaining wall

7

Slate-gray schist, 10 mm

8

1:3 cement mortar (including 5 %

water-repellent), 20 mm

9

C30S6 reinforced concrete, 120 mm

14 15 16 17 18

4 5 6 7

4.800

8 9 10 11 12 13

10 C20 reinforced concrete cushion,

100 mm

11 Gravel, 300 mm 12 Compacted prime soil

6

13 C15 reinforced concrete base,

150 mm

14 Sediment planting soil, 400 mm 15 Rough sand, 400 mm 16 Gravel, 300 mm 17 Clay compacted in layers, 600 mm 18 Compacted prime soil 7

The aqueduct on top of the cascade

wall conducts the river water.

01. slate gray granite top, 250X500mm(50mm thick) 02. planter 03. non-clay brick, 120mm 04. 1:3 cement mortar 120-150 wide bonded slate gray schist 05. 1:3 cement mortar (including 5% water repellent), 20mm 06. waterproof mortar bonded rubble retaining wall, lay1:0.1 tilted 07. slate gray schist, 10mm 08. 1:3 cement mortar (including 5% water repellent), 20mm 09. C30S6 reinforced concrete, 120mm 10. C20 reinforced concrete cushion, 100mm 11. gravel, 300mm 12. prime soil compaction 13. C15 reinforced concrete basis, 150mm 14. sediment planting soil, 400mm 15. rough sand, 400mm 16. gravel, 300mm 17. clay compacted in layers, 600mm

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7

20

21

HOUTAN PARK

46

46 The terraced wetland in the middle of the central water channel creates a quiet valley, allowing people to access the water, enriching the views—seen here from southwest to northeast with the Huangpu River and tall buildings in the background.

47 On the slope of the outer flood control level, which is made of dirt, is a path that allows visitors to penetrate into the landscape and experience the native vegetation (maiden grass) that can grow in poor soil and requires little maintenance.

48 Construction photograph of the central wetland area.

47

48

HOUTAN PARK

PETER G. ROWE

CHINA’S WATER RESOURCES AND HOUTAN PARK A conspicuous aspect of China’s recent modernization, including its burgeoning industrialization and urbanization, is deferment of environmental remediation, resulting in indiscriminate resource use and pollution.

For some time now, according to both official and unofficial estimates, the annual cost of remediation has stood at roughly 30 to 40 percent of annual increases in gross domestic product. Put another way, China’s development is now only weakly sustainable, with a 0.3 to 0.4 percent downturn in environmental quality for every 1 percent increase in economic growth.1 Air pollution remains egregiously high in many areas.

The consumption of arable land for other purposes continues to undermine anything close to self-sufficiency in food production, and overall national energy use has become the highest on the planet. In addition, the vulnerability of the nation’s water resources remains disturbingly high, making sustainable water management one of China’s most pressing long-term environmental issues. This extends to the adequacy of available water supplies, in addition to the problem of water pollution from a variety of sources. Moreover, the risk of flooding remains high in many urban areas.

For some time, large Chinese cities like Beijing have been increasingly dependent on ground water supplies, which are now about 65 percent of the total supply.

Dramatic drops in the water table have raised supply costs substantially and increased the risk of contamination.4 Shanghai, by comparison, has long since largely suspended ground water extraction, except for selective and controlled industrial uses, owing to adverse and costly side effects, such as land subsidence. In addition to the specter of aggregate water shortages, unbalanced geographic distribution makes shortages particularly severe in certain areas, like northern China. 5 At about 10 percent, urban residential and related water use is a relatively small proportion of the total consumption, with agriculture accounting for about 70 percent and industry amounting to the remaining 20 percent.

Water loss through pipe leakage, a lack of recycling, and a lack of more frugal end uses remains high— between 50 or 60 percent more than that experienced in developed countries.6

The volume of water resources among China’s nine large watersheds is said to be about 2,150 cubic meters (568,000 gallons) per capita, although it is likely to shrink to the scarcity threshold—reckoned by experts at 1,700 cubic meters (449,000 gallons) per capita—by 2030.2 This volume is around one third the world average and compares with the United States’s stock of around 7,000 cubic meters (1.85 million gallons) per capita. 3

Residents make their way forward on a piece of slab in a street submerged by flood in Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, after heavy rainstorms, 2010.

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Chinese agriculture for centuries has been an ensemble of fields, canals, locks, and more. Rice paddies in Yunnan, 2006.

reaches of the walled capital of Dadu in the fourteenth century forced the Ming emperor to abandon the area, moving the city’s wall south by 2 kilometers (1.3 miles).

Kaifeng, another walled redoubt beside the Yellow River, was subject to massive destructive flooding on more than one occasion.

Garbage near fishing boats in draught-stricken Xiangjiang River area in Changsha, Hunan Province, China, 2009.

APPROACHES TO RESOURCE CONSERVATION

Although water pollution impedes more sustainable development, some dramatic recent improvements can be seen. Since 1995, for instance, the number of sewage treatment plants has increased by more than 60 percent, and the proportion of water in watersheds classified as Grade I to Grade III—at or near drinking water standards—has doubled in the last eight years. Nevertheless, water classified as unsuitable for drinking is as high as 45 percent of the given water supply, and nearly 45 percent of sewage remains untreated in urban areas.7 In total, some 400 of China’s 650 or more cities, by official definition, experience inadequate water supply due to shortages, pollution, or both, with around one hundred cities experiencing severe inadequacies.8 Finally, flooding continues to be a threat in many cities, especially in the southern and central regions, aggravated by urbanization and the destruction of protective ground cover, which augments overland flows during storms.

This was tragically in evidence during the devastating floods in Sichuan, Guangdong, and Jiangsu Provinces in the summer of 2010. Parenthetically, issues of water management date back centuries in China.

For example, the pollution of water in the northern

Broadly speaking, there are at least two approaches to improved water conservation and better water management in contemporary China. Both can serve the multiple purposes of flood protection, water quality improvement, provision of recreational amenities, and wildlife conservation. The first approach might be called “structural solutions.” This involves engineering and infrastructure—diversion canals, large piped conveyances, surface treatment plants, lock and gate systems of water detention/retention, as well as “new water” technologies, including reverse osmosis and other membrane treatment techniques. Among large-scale structural approaches to water management, relatively successful examples include the Suzhou Creek Rehabilitation Project extending through parts of Shanghai. Begun in 1999 with a sizable loan from the Asian Development Bank, the first phase was completed in 2003 and comprises an extensive addition of waste­water treatment facilities, interception of existing sewers, sediment dredging and re-aeration, garbage removal, and policing of municipal and industrial waste­ water dumping. Lock and gate installations, pumping stations,

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DESIGNED ECOLOGIES DESIGNED ECOLOGIES The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu

“Kongjian Yu is probably the most important Chinese landscape architect of our time. His work points to highly effective and creative ways to address urgent urban growth, environmental, and resource issues not only in China but around the world.”

James Corner

“Yu’s projects have a high quality of craftsmanship that is rare in Asia these days. They are focused on both environmental issues such as native vegetation and sustainable water systems and on cultural features that encourage public use and stimulation.”

Herbert Dreiseitl

“The strength of Kong jian Yu’s practice lies in its imaginative capacity to regenerate ordinary and discarded sites of industrial production, something achieved through the creative calibration of ecological processes and their aesthetic consequences.”

Mohsen Mostafavi

“Kongjian has, through his brilliant work, presented both an example and a challenge to us all.”

Peter Walker

Kong jian Yu and his office Turenscape are beyond doubt the foremost landscape architecture practice in China today. The vast scale of China and her apparently boundless growth have enabled Yu to test many ideas that are still largely theories in the Western world.

His work has attained an extremely high and elegant level in both conception and execution. Kongjian Yu is known for his ecological stance, often against the resistance of local authorities. His guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary and a deep embracing of nature, even in its potentially destructive aspects, such as floods. Among his most acclaimed projects are Houtan Park for Shanghai Expo, the Red Ribbon Park in Qinhuangdao, and Shipyard Park in Zhongshan. This book explores Yu’s work in eleven essays by noted authors and documents twenty-two projects in detail.

The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu WILLIAM S. SAUNDERS (ED.)