Revealing sites: three post-industrial landscapes of Zhu Yufan

Abstract

The landscape architect Zhu Yufan interrogates the legacy of Chinese painting and historic garden design in the context of twenty-first-century post-industrial sites, material culture, and human experiences. This paper examines three projects completed in the past 15 years that extend traditional scholarly principles into contemporary public landscapes. At the Qinghai Atomic Memorial, Zhu explores multiple attributes of ‘threshold’ among other topics. At Chenshan Quarry Garden, he explores shanshui principles, including ‘near and far’ (proximity and distance) and ‘spirit resonance’. At Shougang Qunming Lake Park, he draws from the horizontal unfolding and interstitial spaces of hand scrolls. In these three projects, Zhu challenges a designer’s a priori projections onto a site with a conceptual framework for design that, conversely, expresses the landscape through reading the site. Beauty arrives not only by virtue of painterly space or analytical rationality but also from the agency that the site itself reveals.