Happy Nice Mall

That evening I had the chance to observe Yu in his natural environment. He escorted me and Geng through a series of carved metal doors to the cottage and the courtyard, where the traditional stone floor was replaced with thick glass. Inside, he lowered us to a huge table under a transparent floor. Sitting in ornate, carved chairs, sipping bright green cucumber juice, I gazed at the moon above. The finance ministers were also visiting the club that evening, so Yu turned between our tables. Before I left, he gave me a souvenir: a heavy volume with a title. Engineered Ecologies: Landscape Architecture by Kongjian Yu. After dinner, his driver drove us to my hotel in a brand new Mercedes van, where Yu walked home – his daily constitution.

A week later, I visited one of Turenscape’s ongoing projects: Yongxing River Park in Daxing, a very remote area of ​​Beijing. “Pre” satellite images from three years ago showed a flattened river surrounded by steep concrete walls. The “now” pictures were of a block with buildings around a more generous, meandering road for the water.

When I saw the project it was almost complete. About two and a half miles long and maybe two city blocks wide, the park follows the river. Workers lifted concrete along the riverbed and dug the ground to widen the riverbed. This dirt was then molded into a large embankment running down the centre, creating two channels. The river flows on one side; the other channel has large holes of varying depths that act as filtration pools. During the dry season, the filtration side is filled with partially cleaned wastewater from a sewage treatment plant. Wetland vegetation in the ponds cleans it more and the slow pace allows some of the water to drain underground. During the monsoon season, this channel is reserved for flood waters and the wastewater is treated industrially.

LOOP

Geng and I walked along a thin, concrete path over the middle embankment. Many of Turenscape’s designs feature walkways like this one that rise above the wetlands so people can take in the scenery throughout the year and appreciate the changes from season to season. The wider riverbanks, freshly freed from concrete, are dotted with thousands of small reeds arranged in close rows to hold the earth, like a dotted landscape. We passed young willows, a local stream plant that survived the flood. Elsewhere, reeds, dwarf lily and other native plants stabilize the soil. Turenscape mostly uses native plants in its designs because they thrive on water, air and available nutrients.

In the summer of 2020, during the heavy summer rains, Yu sent me photos of Yongxing River Park. The trees and grass had grown considerably since I visited. The channel contained a lot of water, but was nowhere close to overflowing. Turenscape doesn’t yet have data on Yongxing’s flood capacity, infiltration rate, or water cleaning services, but Yu described that year’s monsoon management as a “great performance.”