“Design is a kind of politics”

At the core of Kongjian Yu’s influential landscape architecture practice was a radically simple idea: After more than a century of redesigning rivers and other waterways to accommodate cities, with increasingly deadly results, it was time to start doing the opposite.

Yu died Tuesday at age 62 in a plane crash in Brazil, where he’d been attending Sao Paolo’s International Architecture Biennial. (Three others onboard were also killed, including a pair of documentarians making a film about Yu’s work.) It was a tragedy that cut short one of the design world’s most astonishing—and in certain ways most improbable—careers. Born in a small village in the coastal province of Zhejiang, just south of Shanghai but in cultural and economic terms a world away, Yu headed at 17 to the Chinese capital to study landscape design at Beijing Forestry University. As he recalled in a 2023 lecture at Harvard, he was one of only 30 students across the whole of China to be enrolled in such a program.

That was in part because landscape architecture and the larger category of garden design, though they of course have a long and rich history in China, had been among the intellectual pursuits marginalized (or at least romanticized and dramatically reordered) during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, by the time he arrived in Beijing in 1980, just three years after Deng Xiaoping reinstated China’s national college entrance exam, there was no recognized landscape architecture profession as such—only, as Yu put it, “a sub-discipline under the Soviet model” of top-down urban planning.

What that meant is that long before Yu could help reinvent landscape architecture in China, which is precisely what he wound up doing, he and his generation first had to reconstitute it.

A good deal of the impetus for his work was personal. He returned to his village—called Dongyu, and named in part after his own family—after earning a pair of degrees in Beijing. He found that flood-control projects built in an effort to modernize the town and its surrounding landscape had instead, in his eyes, destroyed it: “The white-sand stream disappeared, the big trees disappeared—totally ruined.”

This kind of flood-control engineering was being added to landscapes across China as the nation quickly began to urbanize—in large part copying similar strategies in the United States, where they date back to the 1930s. The decision to spray DDT to protect against insects and disease, a practice that accelerated in China ahead of Richard Nixon’s historic visit in 1972, had already taken its own toll.

Seeing his village in that state prompted a kind of epiphany. Yu had spent years in Beijing studying how to make beautiful gardens, when what was really required was a broader strategy, as he said in one interview, “to save the village itself, the landscape.” The tragedy he saw unfolding in his hometown became emblematic in his practice of the poisoning of the planet. (And indeed Yu’s work would wind up toggling between the micro and macro scales, between community-level design and a global perspective, with rare ease.) The village was a fallen Eden, a spoiled Shangri-La. “I have always thought of where I grew up,” he said, “as the Land of Peach Blossoms. I believe that landscape architecture is the way to recover the Land of Peach Blossoms.”

Yu decided to apply to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he would study with figures including Peter Rowe, Carl Steinitz, Peter Walker, Ian McHarg, and Martha Schwartz and earn a doctorate in 1995. His dissertation, which incorporated game theory and nascent forms of data science, had a bone-dry title: “Security Patterns in Landscape Planning.” But buried inside that document, which Yu characterized as the scholarly, carefully typed version of a larger vision (or, as he memorably put it, an “eco-utopia built in the basement of Gund Hall”), was a deeply inventive and humane set of ideas that would guide the rest of his career.

Instead of pushing stormwater away, or damming against it, what if cities began taking inspiration from the way farmers in villages like his hometown dealt with annual monsoons? What if the arrival of water—even millions of gallons of it—could again be something to look forward to instead of something to fear? What if we insisted on reshaping cities to make room for water rather than reshaping waterways to make room for cities? What if we could slow down and capture stormwater instead of whisking it quickly out to sea inside concrete culverts designed solely by engineers? What if water contained in this way could help cool warming cities?

Yu was not alone in asking these questions, the answers to which make up what he dubbed the “Sponge City” concept. The same philosophy has guided a number of landscape reformers and ecological activists, including many in the United States. One of the great sliding-doors moments in the modern history of Los Angeles, for example, concerns a report on regional green-space planning commissioned by the city’s powerful Chamber of Commerce in 1927—before the Los Angeles River was concretized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—from the Olmsted Brothers firm along with Harland Bartholomew. (This is a story wonderfully told in the 2000 UC Press book “Eden by Design,” by William Deverell and Greg Hise.) The “Olmsted Plan,” as it’s still known in shorthand, argued in part for restricting urban development along the L.A. River to allow it to meander, setting aside park space designed to accommodate flooding and help recharge local aquifers. The proposal was so progressive and far-reaching that the Chamber of Commerce, whose leadership included a number of architects and real-estate developers, quickly understood how much it would threaten the economic status quo and effectively shelved it.

What made Yu different was his ability to move fluidly—pun intended!—through the disparate worlds of landscape ecology, academia, high design, media, and government. He founded a program in landscape architecture at Beijing’s prestigious Peking University that has seen 1,200 students earn advanced degrees. (Yu made a point of establishing the program under the umbrella of Geography—“not gardening, not horticulture, not art.”) He started a landscape architecture magazine. Most impressive of all, his Beijing-based firm, Turenscape, has completed more than 500 projects in 250 cities (including Seattle’s Hing Hay Park) since its founding in 1998. Many have become exemplars of the Sponge City concept by setting aside large swaths of land, in city centers from Bangkok to Nanchang, designed to store rainwater and accommodate periodic flooding.

Typically these projects include manmade islands connected across the water by pedestrian bridges. The design strategy—simple in theory but dramatic at scale—borrows from lessons Yu picked up in Dongyu, age-old ideas about terracing, ponding, and otherwise gently reshaping the landscape to slow down, capture, and store great quantities of stormwater. If there has been one recurring critique of this approach, it is that to succeed fully it will require giving as much as twenty percent of the land in dense urban centers over to new watery parks—a heavy political lift in the best of circumstances. Yu didn’t flinch in the face of such objections; if anything, he would say, the twenty percent goal was too low.

Instead of what he called the “gray” infrastructure of concrete channels and civil engineering, Yu imagined a return to landscapes combining “blue with green”: water with gardens. His early designs, suggesting that he was looking at projects like Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette as well as reading his McHarg, frequently also had the benefit of being highly photogenic.

This range and volume of work was possible only because of Yu’s energy, charisma, and remarkable political skills. These helped see the basics of the Sponge City philosophy adopted as official Chinese policy at the national level. (He is surely the only figure in the design world to have nabbed contributions to his books from both Michael Sorkin and Xi Jinping.) And Yu gained this level of political buy-in not by turning himself into a sycophant or party mouthpiece but, remarkably, by speaking freely when he felt Chinese leadership was coming up short.

As the art historian John Beardsley told the New York Times last year, “Kongjian has managed to be very critical of the government’s environmental policies while still maintaining his practice and his academic appointments. He’s both brave and deft in this regard, threading a very narrow needle.”

Or, as Yu himself put it, “Design is a kind of politics.”

I never met Yu, though I was supposed to later this year. We had both been invited by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which awarded Yu its Oberlander Prize in 2023, to speak at a conference in Los Angeles in early December. The event, with a focus on “designing for urban flooding,” is called “Soak It Up”—the perfect title for a memorial to Yu, which is what I suspect the conference as a whole will turn out to be.

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