The New Vernacular: Redefining Urbanity in Contemporary China

The following announcement is posted on ASLA’s Opportunities and Events page, where users can find the latest information on everything from conferences and meetings to calls for papers, requests for proposals, and consulting opportunities. Here, a perspective on landscape architecture in China from a leading practitioner there.

What: Public Lecture

Who: Professor Kongjian Yu, International ASLA, Peking University

Title: The New Vernacular: Redefining Urbanity in Contemporary China

When: Wednesday, October 1, 2008, at 5:30 PM

Where: Dumbarton Oaks in the Music Room at the Main House
1703 32nd Street NW, Washington, D.C.
(Registration begins at 5:00 PM)

In the prevailing “City Beautiful” movement in China today, urban design and landscape architecture have lost their way in searching for a suitable style, resulting in meaningless forms and exotic grandeur. Examples in contemporary China include the new Olympic park and the steel-wasting “Bird’s Nest,” the dangerously flamboyant CCTV tower, and the energy-wasting National Opera House. All these facilities express the outmoded values of the urban elite and do nothing more than accelerate degradation of our environment. The question has to be asked: Is this sustainable? Dr. Yu will argue that landscape and urban design should be recovered as an art of survival and as a tool to redefine urbanity: “the new vernacular.” He will present several of his award-winning projects—including Zhongshan Shipyard Park, the Rice Campus of Shenyang Architecture University, the Floating Gardens of Yongning River Park, the Red Ribbon Tanghe River Park, and the “Negative Approach to Urban Development” for Taizhou City—in the context of ideas about sustainability, tradition, cultural identity, and modernization in the Chinese context.

Professor Kongjian Yu, International ASLA, is the founder and dean of the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University, a professor of urban and regional planning, and founder and president of Turenscape, one of the first and largest private landscape architecture and urban design firms in China. He received his doctor of design award from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1995. Dr. Yu has lectured internationally and has written more than 200 papers and 15 books; he is also chief editor of Landscape Architecture China. Among numerous other honors, Dr. Yu has received five Honor Awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects; he was the recipient of the Chinese Cultural Ministry’s National Gold Medal of Fine Arts in 2004; and he was awarded the Oversea Chinese Pioneer Achievement Medal by the Chinese central government in 2004 for his overall contribution to the nation. Time magazine celebrated his ecologically and culturally sensitive design as “A Force of Nature” in their issue of April 17, 2006, and in the April 2008 issue of Conde Nast Traveler, his design of Red Ribbon Tanghe River Park was hailed as one of the "new seven wonders of the architecture world."

Reservations are required. Please RSVP by September 30 to Landscape@doaks.org, 202-339-6460. The lecture will be held in the Music Room at Dumbarton Oaks’s Main House located at 1703 32nd Street NW, Washington, D.C. The lecture is open to the public without charge. A light reception to follow; parking not provided.