Beijing-based landscape architect Kongjian Yu has been announced by the Cultural Landscape Foundation as the recipient of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize (“Oberlander Prize”). Kongjian Yu has gained international recognition for his concept of “sponge cities,” a measure to address and prevent urban flooding in the context of accelerated climate change. The concept was adopted as a national policy in China in 2013, prioritizing large-scale nature-based infrastructures such as wetlands, greenways, parks, canopy tree and woodland protection, rain gardens, green roofs, permeable pavements, and bioswales. Yu has been selected by the international jury of the Oberlander Prize, recognizing him as “a force for progressive change in landscape architecture around the world.” Organized biannually, the prize aims to recognize and give visibility to landscape architecture and the ways in which it can address issues of climate change and sustainability.
Yu founded and continues to lead the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture and the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Peking University. He is also the founder and principal of the landscape architecture office Turenscape, an office founded on the principle of creating “harmony between land and people and sustainable environments for the future.” Yu holds a doctoral degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and is the author of over twenty books, having also established the awarded magazine Landscape Architecture Frontier.
Despite international acclaim, Yu describes himself as a “peasant’s son,” born in 1963 in a small village in the Zhejiang Province. The continuity between the village life and the natural environment was an important influence for Yu, a continuity later damaged by pollution and deforestation. According to William Saunders, author of the book “Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu”, this helps us understand Yu’s commitment to recreating and protecting natural abundance. It also emphasized Yu’s revulsion of ‘ornamental’ landscapes in favor of productive and low-maintenance parks.
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Why Landscape Architecture Matters Now More Than EverThe destruction of my own paradise is what makes me think that we need a revolution”; the core of that revolution is the “sponge cities” concept. - Kongjian Yu, in a recent interview
For over 25 years, Kongjian Yu has used his career to fight against deteriorating urban ecologies. His research on Ecological Security Patterns (1995) and Ecological Infrastructure, Negative Planning, and Sponge Cities (2003) has laid the foundation for China’s policy for leading nationwide ecological protection initiatives and restoration campaigns. Yu’s firm, Turenscape, has contributed to this direction with over 600 built projects in more than 200 cities, principally in China, but also in France, Indonesia, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.S. Notable projects include the Red Ribbon Park in Hebei Province, Shanghai Houtan Park, Qunli Stormwater Wetland Park in Heilongjiang Province, China, the Benjakitti Forest Park in Thailand and the Hing Hay Park in Seattle, United States.
Kongjian Yu has achieved the extraordinary. He is a landscape architect whose design philosophy and concepts, which interweave nature and culture, and are committed to design excellence, have been adopted as national policy in one of the world’s largest and most populous nations – that has international implications and global impact. - TCLF President & CEO Charles A. Birnbaum
In 2021, during the first edition of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, Julie Bargmann was named the recipient of the award. Bargmann is the founder of the landscape architecture firm D.I.R.T. Studio and a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. The creation of the Oberlander Prize has begun in 2024 with TCLF’s efforts to prevent the demolition of the Frick Collection’s Russell Page-designed viewing garden on East 70th Street in New York City. The significant build works realized by the recipients of the prize are added to the TCLF’s What’s Out There® database.
