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.

Yu’s advocacy was blunt, insistent, sometimes uncomfortable, urging designers to abandon delicate aesthetics for messy, productive resilience. In 2020, he received IFLA’s Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award, and in 2023, the Oberlander Prize for his transformative impact. But his influence long exceeded awards: he unsettled the discipline by keeping an undisturbed focus on the sponge principle, drawing it toward relevance in the face of ecological collapse.

Yu had been in São Paulo on September 23rd 2025, for the International Architecture Biennale and was travelling with filmmakers documenting his work when the aircraft crashed.

See Turenscape’s projects on Landezine.