Kongjian Yu is Professor and founding dean of Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape, and founder and design principal of Turenscape. Yu’s guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary and a deep embrace of nature—even of its potentially destructive aspects, such as flooding. His projects have won numerous international design awards, including 14 ASLA Excellence and Honor Awards and 7 WAF Best Landscape Architecture of the Year Award. Yu is also the author of over 20 books and more than 300 papers and is the founder and chief editor of the internationally awarded magazine Landscape Architecture Frontiers. His thinking about “ecological security patterns” helped shape environmental protection efforts throughout China. And his promotion of the “sponge city” concept, which uses landscape to capture, filter, and store rainfall for future use and reduce flood risks, helped to spur the Chinese government to launch an ambitious sponge city campaign across the country and has gained global attention. Yu was elected International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and received the IFLA’s highest honor, the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award, in 2020, which celebrates a living landscape architect whose “achievements and contributions have had a unique and lasting impact on the welfare of society.” The Harvard Graduate School of Design hosts Professor Kongjian Yu on September 14 at 6:30 at Gund Hall Piper Auditorium. Free and open to the public. For additional information on parking and accessibility, visit www.gsd.harvard.edu
