Kongjian Yu received his Doctor of Design at the Harvard GSD. He is Changjiang Chair Professor in Design at Peking University and is the founder of the College of Architecture and Landscape. He founded Turenscape, an internationally awarded firm of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism and is one of the first private firms in China. Through his research and practice, Yu tries to reconstruct ecological infrastructure at various scales and to define a new aesthetics based on ecology.
He is well recognized for his numerous proposals to the Chinese central government about ecological security and eco-city planning and design that have fundamentally changed the environmental and land use policies in China. He is well recognized for his determined effort in promoting the profession and education of landscape architecture in China. Yu’s projects received numerous international awards for their ecologically sound and culturally sensitive design, including the 2009 ULI Global Award for Excellence, the 2010 and 2012 ASLA award of Excellence, and 9 other ASLA Honor Awards, three time winner of World Landscape Award at the World Architectural Festival.
His projects have been reviewed in over 1000 magazine and journal articles worldwide. The most recent book: Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu (William Saunders ed., Birkhauser, 2012) explores Yu’s work in eleven essays by the world noted authors and extensively documents 22 of selected projects.
Yu publishes widely including 20 books and over 300 papers. His current publications include The Beautiful Big Foot, Landscape as Ecological Infrastructure and The Art of Survival. He have lectured worldwide and was keynote speaker for the 40th, 43rd, 46th and 48th IFLA World Congress, the 2006 and 2008 ASLA annual conference, and taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design for the past five years. Yu served the Master Jury for the Aga Kahn Architecture Award in 2010, and the Super Jury for 2011 World Architecture Festival.
Specialism
Landscape, Ecology and water systems
Organisation
Turenscape
