Kongjian Yu​ wins the 2023 Oberlander Prize for achievements in landscape architecture

The Prize's jury citation praised the work of Yu’s award-winning practice Turenscape, while stating its output has conversely "managed both to take advantage of China’s convulsive urbanization and to challenge it."

The impact Yu has also left through his teaching position at Peking University was also mentioned as another critical factor in their decision. 

Yu has to-date completed over 600 projects in more than 200 cities in Asia and the United States in addition to his prolific activities as the author of more than twenty books and founding editor of Landscape Architecture Frontier magazine. This influence has helped garner a reputation as an overmodest "Olmsted of China." Yu, who also won a 2023 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, studied for a Ph.D. at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and practiced with SWA Group in Los Angeles before returning to his home country in 1997.

"He has striven to direct landscape practices away from a destructive confrontation with natural forces toward a more optimistic position of cooperation and adaptation," the jury citation reads finally. "Through books, lectures, and letters, he has courageously reached out to large and small city mayors and party officials to foster his more collaborative approach to natural systems at the urban scale and to promote his National Ecological Security Pattern Plan, intended to safeguard biological, cultural and recreational resources by protecting the ecosystem services on which they depend."

A video interview with Yu can be viewed below, courtesy of The Cultural Landscape Foundation.