KONGJIAN YU， FASLA
Changjiang Chair Professor of Design, Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape
President and Principal Designer, Turenscape
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

A Recipient of a Doctor of Design degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Kongjian Yu is founder of the College of Architecture and Landscape at Peking University. In addition, he is the founder and president of Turenscape, one of the first and largest private urbanism and landscape architecture firms in China. His pioneering research on the “ecological security patterns” and “sponge cities” have been adopted by the Chinese government as the guiding theory for national land use planning, eco-city campaign, and urban ecological restoration. His practice includes landscape and urbanism in major cities around the world. His guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary and a deep embracing of nature, even in its potentially destructive aspects, such as urban flooding.Professor Yu’s numerous awards include 13 ASLA Excellence and Honor Awards and a 2009 Urban Land Institute Global Award, and 5 World Best Landscape of the Year Award (World Architecture Festival).
His writing and lectures have addressed a range of topics including ‘The Beautiful Big Foot’, ‘Landscape as Ecological Infrastructure’, ‘The Art of Survival’, and ‘Deep Form in Urban Nature’. Yu served the Master Jury for the Aga Kahn Architecture Award in 2010, and its Steering Committee in 2015-2016, and the Super Jury for 2011 World Architecture Festival, and many other international award juries.
Yu is a fellow of American Society of Landscape Architects, and was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. In 2017 he received the Doctor Honoris Causa in Landscape and Environment from the Sapienza University of Rome.