We are sad to report that Kongjian Yu died on September 23, 2025.

Yu was a farmer’s son from Zhejiang who became the architect of a new ecological urbanism. After early studies in Beijing and a doctorate at Harvard GSD, he returned to China in the late 1990s to found the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Peking University and his practice, Turenscape. In the decades since, the office completed over a thousand projects, balancing China’s violent urbanization with ecological infrastructures that resisted erasure.

He championed the “sponge city” vision—landscapes designed to hold, filter, and release water—cut through the ornamental fictions of landscape design and became national policy in China, later spreading across continents. Yu pushed the idea further, insisting that climate crisis cannot be fought with carbon metrics alone, but demands a re-stabilization of the global water cycle.

中文翻译:

我们沉痛地报告，俞孔坚于2025年9月23日逝世。

俞先生是浙江一位农民的儿子，他后来成为倡导一种新的、生态的城市生活方式的景观设计师。在北京完成早期学业并获得哈佛设计学院博士学位后，他于上世纪90年代末回到中国，在北京大学创办了建筑与景观设计学院，并成立了自己的设计工作室——土人设计。此后的几十年里，他的工作室完成了上千个项目，在中国的剧烈城市化与生态基础设施的维护之间取得了平衡。

他倡导“海绵城市”的愿景——一种能够吸纳、净化和释放水的景观——打破了景观设计中装饰性的矫饰，并成为中国的国家政策，随后传播到各大洲。俞先生进一步推动了这一理念，坚信气候危机不能仅靠碳排放指标来应对，而是需要重新稳定全球水循环。