Kongjian Yu keynote speaker

Kongjian Yu is the founder and Dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape. He founded Turenscape, an internationally awarded firm of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism. Yu defines landscape and urban design as the Art of Survival and is well known for his ecological stance, which often against the resistance from local authorities. Through his works, Yu tries to reconstruct ecological infrastructure across scales as alternative infrastructure to solve multiple environmental problems and to define a new aesthetics (the big feet aesthetics).

His ecological approach to urbanism has been implemented in over 200 cities in China and abroad, and have had significant impact on national policies aiming at improving the environment in China, for which he was recognised with numerous awards and honours by the central government including the Overseas Chinese Achievement Award, the One Thousand Talents Award. He has also won numerous international awards including 12 ASLA Excellence and Honor Awards (American Society of Landscape Architects), an ULI Global Award for Excellence in 2009, and 5 WAF Landscape of the year Awards at the World Architecture Festival (2009, 2010, 2011,2015 and 2017) and Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award (2020). He received the Doctor Honoris Causa in Landscape and Environment from the Sapienza University of Rome in 2017, and the Honorary Doctor in Landscape architectrure from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in 2019.

Yu has published over 20 books and 300 articles. Sponge City, Big feet Revolution, Art of Survival, and Deep Form are some of the key words that depicted his design philosophy and research. His works have been featured in publications such as Scientific American (December 2018), Time, and Landscape Architecture (February 2012), and two recently published books: Letters to Chinese Leaders: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City, and Designed Ecologies: The landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu.