Author Archives: Tom Turner

Kongjian Yu's Bigfoot Revolution for Chinese landscape architecture 俞孔坚 大脚革命 中国园林建筑

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Landscape architecture: Keynote of Kongjian Yu from hayal oezkan on Vimeo.

Kongjian Yu has a good claim to the title of China’s leading landscape architect. He is an author, a professor and the employer of 600 landscape architects. In 2011 he gave an IFLA keynote lecture at the World Congress in Zurich.
So who, in the history of landscape architecture, should we compare Kongjian Yu to? Senenmut? Le Notre? Humphry Repton? Frederick Law Olmsted? Lawrence Halprin? Ian McHarg? Peter Walker? From this list, my answer is ‘Beyond a doubt, Ian McHarg’. Kongjian Yu has strength in planning, design and theory but, beyond all these, he is a publicist and popularizer.
Yu’s Bigfoot idea is that modern cities are akin to the ancient Chinese art of foot-binding 缠足. Bound feet may conceivably be beautiful in some warped eyes but the practice was cruel, un-natural and done for the gratification of men with warped minds. This is not why international modern cities are made the way they are made. Prof. Yu equates urbanisation with gentrification, which is also inaccurate (gentrification is the process of converting low-income urban areas into high-income urban areas). In the longer term, good design is mostly likely to result from good theory. But his two strategies are surely correct: (1) Provide a natural infrastructure to integrate hydrology, biodiversity and the cultural heritage, thus creating an ‘Ecological Infrastructure (2) establish a New Aesthetics, deriving from the ecological infrastructure.
But this is nit-picking. China is very lucky to have Kongjian Yu and I would like to see him appointed Chief Technical Officer to the The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development 住房和城乡建设部.
Comments in the video:

  • Peach trees become flowers without fruits
  • Fish, when they are urbanised, become goldfish
  • Beijing has a population of 20m and its water table is falling by 1m/year
  • We should minimise interventions and maximise returns
  • We should learn from nature
  • The Red Ribbon Park was made in 3 months.
  • Use nature to transform, make useful, and make beautiful
  • 75% of China’s surface water is heavily polluted
  • We need a big foot revolution
  • We need a new Chinese garden to survive
  • Tiananmen Square is “Too big, too big”. We should turn it into a productive sunflower field.

The last comment reminds me that I wrote and invited Kongjian Yu to enter the Gardenvisit.com Tiananmen Square Design Competition. He did not take part and I doubt if his wonky design for filling the square with sunflowers would have been commended. Perhaps he guessed this and decided not to send in the entry!
One other comment: like China, Kongjian Yu is trying to do too much too quickly (eg the Red River Park). Much better to take some more time and do some superb work.
Does anyone know if Kongjian Yu is a member of the Chinese Communist Party CCP?

London's Roman Palace Garden at Cannon Street Station

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Roman palace garden image projected onto a minimalist wall at Cannon Street Station

Reading about London’s Roman archaeology, I was deligted to find that the site of the Provincial Governor’s Palace is open to the public. It is now the foyer of Cannon Street Station (ie the foyer is above the garden site). So I went to take a photograph. My camera went ‘click’ at 09.52.15 on 05.1.2012 and 57 seconds later a shifty looking man approached me with an ID card and we had the following exchange.
‘I am the station manager. Did you know that this is a private place and you are not allowed to take photographs?????’.
‘No. I thought it was a public place. Please can you show me the sign which says “No Photography”‘
‘There isn’t one. Do you have a sign in your house saying “No Photography”?????’
‘No but there is a difference between a private house and a ………..’
I could not finish the sentence because he interrupted me to say ‘I could call the police’. I asked him not to interrupt and made 3 more attempts to complete my sentence. It could not be done, so I ended the conversation with the remark that that ‘If this is how “station managers” waste their time it is no surprise that National Rail has operating costs way above the European average. It also has lower standards – and the staff are often impolite’.
No doubt he could have given me the Nuremberg defence ‘I was just following orders’ and to show I bear no personal grudge I have decided not to bill Network Rail for the imaginative proposal, above, for using his blank wall as a place on which to project illustrations of Roman Palace gardens. He should also install a Triclinum and train for the more rewarding job of serving Roman delicacies to customers suffering psychological damage from their experiences with London’s rail system.
The site of the Villa and Palace Garden of London's Roman Provincial Governor is now below the foyer of Cannon Street Station

The site of the Villa and Palace Garden of London's Roman Provincial Governor is now the foyer of Cannon Street Station

. Let us hope National Rail ‘read the writing on the wall’ and put on the Roman Palace Garden Projection as a contribution to the 2012 Chelsea Fringe Garden Festival.

Lady Boothroyd wants to get rid of her garden mole problem

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Garden molehill problem?

The former Speaker of the House of Commons was on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, asking for advice on her garden mole problem. She said they are mole mountains, not molehills. BBC staff found ‘experts’ who recommended poison gas and mole traps. They also advised that when a mole dies, another mole ‘comes to his funeral’: they re-use the tunnel system. So here is my advice to Lady Boothroyd: get rid of ‘the mole problem’ by re-conceptualizing it! Forget about ‘How to be a lawn expert’. Retire from the field of battle. Learn to love your enemies: the ‘little gentlemen in a black velvet waistcoat‘. Admire those beautiful mounds they make in the laughing meadows of Olde England. Cast your mind back to 1970: it was European Conservation Year. Say HAPPY NEW YEAR to the animal kingdom, as Gardenvisit.com does to its readers.
Images courtesy: zoer, Mick E. Talbot, alh1

Tim Mowl's Youtube garden history lecture on Claremont and William Kent

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Congratulations to Tim Mowl for providing the best garden history content on Youtube (one can’t be quite sure: The FAQ says ’48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day’). The lecture was given at Claremont Landscape Garden and was about the history of this garden and William Kent. Though Tim Mowl obviously knows more about the period than me, I offer the following comments:

  • Mowl mentions Renaissance Italy and Ancient Rome, in relation to the development of England’s eighteenth century gardens, but I wish he had said more about them.
  • In my view, Mowl over-emphasises the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘geometry’ in explaining the ‘great revolution in taste’. Since most English garden historians do this, one can hardly complain. Conceptually ‘Nature’, belongs more to the history of philosophy than the history of art.
  • I would have like to have heard more about the transition from Baroque to Neoclassical, in art, literature and gardens. Conceptually, the links between these topics are closer than then link between gardens and philosophy. There is however no doubt about the importance of ‘Nature’ as a philosophical concept (rather than as a geometrical concept).
  • I agree about the eclectic character of the first (Augustan) phase of the English landscape garden, but see it as a consequence rather than a cause of the revolution in taste. The cause was a desire to see, know, understand, learn from and represent the classical world. ‘Eclectic’ is almost a term of abuse and ‘Historicist’ may be a more useful term.

See also:

Conceptual gardens, folding, Deleuze and landscape design

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What is a conceptual garden? - and what is a folded landscape?

The RHS has a conceptual gardens category, at the Hampton Court Flower Show, which has produced excellent work, pathetic work – and much confusion. (See: Hampton Court Conceptual Garden Applications for how the RHS explains the Concept Gardens idea). So let’s take the Folded Landscape, by Voght for the Laban Centre as an example.

  1. Conceptual art foregrounds ideas, with visual imagery taking a backseat.
  2. Gilles Deleuze put forward a set of ideas which derive from deconstruction, and which have almost superseded deconstruction as an influence on design theory. The underlying principle is monist: the world is only one thing (which Spinoza identified with God) and it constantly folds into new forms. The One becomes the Many; the Many is always the One (is there a Buddhist resonance here?)
  3. Voght designed a Folded Landscape for the Laban Centre. It is a prime example of a Conceptual Garden Design – with room for fruitful debate as to whether the visual image is the foreground, background or reflected ground.

The folding concept, though explained by its advocates with the greatest possible linguistic obfuscation, is an attractive principle for the re-integration of architectural design with garden and landscape design – after modernism rent them asunder.

Gardenvisit.com welcomes the Christmas (selling) season

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