{"id":10230,"date":"2013-11-26T18:07:19","date_gmt":"2013-11-26T18:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/?p=10230"},"modified":"2025-09-26T12:56:19","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T11:56:19","slug":"kongjian-yu-landscape-architecture-as-an-art-of-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/kongjian-yu-landscape-architecture-as-an-art-of-survival\/","title":{"rendered":"Kongjian Yu &#8211; landscape architecture as an art of survival"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JH96L4JxMyA?si=GR63WyMUcJqhiPOL\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/15\/context-sensitive-landscape-architecture-in-china\/\">praised Kongjian Yu&#8217;s work before<\/a> and much enjoyed his lecture to the HGSD (above). I particularly like his advice to \u2018make friends with the flood\u2019 and to design for the \u2018integration of contemporary art and ecology\u2019. But I am having doubts about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/10\/kongjian-yus-bigfoot-revolution-for-chinese-landscape-architecture-%E4%BF%9E%E5%AD%94%E5%9D%9A-%E5%A4%A7%E8%84%9A%E9%9D%A9%E5%91%BD-%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E5%9B%AD%E6%9E%97%E5%BB%BA%E7%AD%91\/\">my call for him to be appointed Chief Technical Officer<\/a> to the The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development \u4f4f\u623f\u548c\u57ce\u4e61\u5efa\u8bbe\u90e8. For sure, he would be very good at the job &#8211; but the landscape architecture profession has greater need of him.<br \/>\nIt is bad mannered of me to criticise Kongjian after he quotes me in his lecture, but there are two historical points I would like to correct. First, the history of landscape architecture in east and west can be traced back for thousands of years &#8211; though its name is but 185 years old. Second, the planning of western gardens and parks &#8216;for ornament&#8217; dates from c1700 and is now in decline. Older parks and gardens were always planted for food.<br \/>\nSo here is an invitation: next time Kongjian Yu is in London I would be delighted to show him round my local park and the new building for the University of Greenwich Department of Landscape Architecture. Greenwich Park was designed in 1660 primarily for food production &#8211; and it still produces a large quantity of food, much of which is collected by ethnic Chinese. So it is very appropriate that the roof of the new school has the production of food as one of its main design aims: it will be used for research into the use of living roofs for food production and other sustainable purposes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have praised Kongjian Yu&#8217;s work before and much enjoyed his lecture to the HGSD (above). I particularly like his advice to \u2018make friends with the flood\u2019 and to design for the \u2018integration of contemporary art and ecology\u2019. But I am having doubts about my call for him to be appointed Chief Technical Officer to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,10,24,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10230"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10230"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11272,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10230\/revisions\/11272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}