landscape matters volume 5 - Flipbook - Page 33
Book reviews
7.2
Richard J Weller + Tatum L Hands, editors
Beautiful China: Reflections on Landscape Architecture
in Contemporary China
Oro Editions, 2021 / 212 Pages / ISBN: 9781943532810
At the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist
Party in 2012 President Xi Jinping made the superb declaration
that: 'Building an ecological civilization is a matter of people’s
well-being and a long-term plan for the future'. At the 19th
National Congress in 2017 he said more: ‘We must pursue a
model of sustainable development featuring increased production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems'.
We must continue the Beautiful China initiative to create good
working and living environments for our people and play our
part in ensuring global ecological security.’ Hence the book’s
title: Beautiful China. But one of the useful things China has
learned from the West is the environmental policy of saying the
right things while doing the wrong things.
This book publishes papers from a UPenn Symposium held in
Beijing in March 2019. Most of the papers reference Xi’s declaration, as does China’s most famous landscape architect,
Kongjian Yu, but he adds that ‘Sadly, most of the ugly landscapes of China are designed and constructed in the name of
beauty: countless odd buildings in the cities, ridiculous giant
plazas, and huge boulevards blazing with neon light. Tens, or
even hundreds, of thousands of channelized river are built with
lifeless hard riverbanks; marble paving and fake Tiananmen
Squares are built in remote villages.' I am a great admirer of
what Yu has done through his own practice to create beautiful
projects in China - and of his use of the landscape urbanism
design method to achieve these results. He would be a wonderful leader for China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural
Development () but perhaps his work as a
designer is more important.
Old and New China
As an example of Ugly China, I recommend Tao Han’s essay
on ‘XL Greenhouse’. He writes that ‘Today, the Chinese countryside is not an idyllic landscape. Instead, it is more likely
to feature vast areas of continuous plastic greenhouses.’ In
Kunming, for example, ‘hundreds of villages have been connected by the ocean-like surface of the greenhouses forming
an archipelago in a plastic ocean. The reality of the Chinese
countryside that we are facing today is no longer the pictorial
imagination of the pre-modern legacy, but the expression of
modernization and with it the extinction of the traditional village. Agricultural peasants now become assembly-line workers in plastic factories and the rural landscape becomes an
object of capital consumption’. Parts of Britain are tending in
the same direction and they present an awful choice: would you
rather have food grown under plastic or food grown from GM
products sprayed with Monsanto-esque chemicals? Does our
profession have a view on the siting of greenhouses?
Another interesting essay is by Christopher Marcinkoski, from
UPenn. He has taught many Chinese students and took a group
of them to visit South China, which many had not seen. As he
relates: ‘While I would propose visiting recently completed
public spaces, or notable pieces of contemporary architecture,
the students’ repeated preference was to search out so-called
urban villages and more intimate and hidden spaces of these
urban landscapes’.They wanted to visit ‘unsanitized, gritty,
and - notably - timeworn alternatives’. Their conception of
‘Beautiful China’ was vernacular. Like Yu, they despise ‘odd
buildings’ and ‘ridiculous giant plazas’. Good.
I see China’s political system as a continuation of its imperial system and hope this can extend to ‘another life’ for the
ancient principle which editor Richard Weller summarises as
follows: ‘Whereas for the Greeks geometry was the key to its
inner sanctum, for the Taoists beauty manifested in the wild
landscape, in the mountains (shan) and the water (shui), the
quintessence of which (chi) can be channeled into the symbolic microcosms of poetry, paintings and garden design’. Weller
is a notable landscape theorist, though I am more in agreement
with what he says about China than with what he says about
ancient Greece: the siting of Greek temples is as significant as
their geometry.
Tom Turner
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