Today I heard an inspiring lecture by Kongjian Yu - a Landscape Architect from China (here is the website http://www.turenscape.com/English//Designer.php ). He is all about healing the Chinese landscape through a "Big Foot Revoultion" - that is, changing the aesthetic of beauty from "little foot" to "big foot" - the analogy being based on the cultural "foot binding" - which sacrifices function for ornamental. He says "the nature's feet are bound in the city with dikes, concrete, and pollution" - "little foot is a beauty of uselessness and deformity" -"big foot is productive and restorative".
Since he began his work in China (after studying at Harvard and receiving his PhD in Landscape Design and Architecture and studying with Ian McHarg - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McHarg) he has impacted many cities and regions with his "Big Foot Revolution" -
His strategies for change include:
1. Beauty - he showed many slides of projects he has done that interprets ecology with art
2. Productivity - he showed slides from a university where the budget to build the campus had run out and they needed a landscape - and they needed the landscape in 6 months - here we restored the rice paddies and ponding for water ways and now the University has celebrations each spring and fall around the rice and they sell their school rice as well.
3. Value the ordinary and recycle the existing - here he showed slides of a collapsed ship yard that he restored using the structural shells of buildings as art and walkways all along the river
4. Minimize intervention and maximize return - here he showed slides of a park that cost more for the upfront design than the actual construction
5. Landscape Acupuncture - here is made an small pressure release "ponds" along a urban setting that allowed the nature to reestablish and transform the urban edge into a productive park
6. Help nature to recover and let nature do the work - this was an example of an old dump-site (brown field) where he had many ponds all at different depths to help the surface water to collect where and when needed
7. Landscapes as Solutions to flooding - to not rely on pipes or channels (China uses the 50% of the worlds cement and 35% of the worlds steel) but to cut and fill all along the edges of water sheds to work with nature and the urban settings
8. Landscape as living machine - here he mimicked the terracing of rice paddies in the mountains by creating ponds at different depths and heights to filter the pollution and clean it by the time it found the ocean
9. Opportunities to transform urban to renewal using landscape as the tool for urban design and development - urban growth following the landscape system (70% of China's surface waters are polluted)
10. Low-carbon home building incorporating storm-water from roof to water vegies and flowers and trickling indoors to cool the building
Sept. 30
Today Camilla picked me up bright and early as we headed to Asker to visit the NaKuHel Center (here is the website: http://www.nakuhel.no/ ). Nakuhel is a combination of a nature center, park, community center and art colony. It is supported by both government and private funds. I offers children kindergarten, horse-back riding, gardening, painting, cooking, and many other programs that are initiated by the public and support by the facilities of Nakuhel. It was a lovely place and our host (Kristin) was spectacular. Here are some photos....
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