2025 Childs Lecture: Kongjian Yu with Charles Waldheim

Over the past thirty years, Kongjian Yu has led a counter-current movement in landscape architecture, resisting the destructive forces of industrial urbanization by rooting design in traditional wisdom, ecological science, and nature’s resilience. Rejecting the ornamental “Little Feet” aesthetics, YU advocates for a “Big Feet Revolution” that redefines beauty through function, productivity, and authenticity in landscape and urban design. Through strategies like Landscape Security Patterns, Nature-Based Solutions, and Sponge Cities/Planet, Yu's work envisions a future where cities are shaped as living systems that heal rather than harm our planet.

Join us Monday, October 20, 2025, at 6PM EDT for the 2025 Childs Lecture featuring Kongjian Yu with Charles Waldheim as interlocutor, in person at the BAC or virtually!

Kongjian Yu, a farmer’s son and Doctor of Design from Harvard, is the founding dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape at Peking University and a globally recognized leader in ecological urbanism. As founder of Turenscape, he has pioneered nature-based, water-driven solutions for climate resilience—most notably the Sponge City and Sponge Planet concepts—which have shaped China’s ecological strategies and gained worldwide influence. His work spans more than 1,000 projects across 250 cities at multiple scales. Yu’s contributions have earned him the highest honors in the field, including the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Prize, the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, and over 100 other international design awards., RAIC International Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Sapienza University of Rome and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Charles Waldheim is a North American architect and urbanist based in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is John E. Irving Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. Waldheim is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous publications on these topics, including Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, Cartographic Grounds, Third Coast Atlas, Case: Lafayette Park Detroit, and Stalking Detroit. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan; and the Cullinan Chair at Rice University. He has been a visiting scholar at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany.

Established in 2008, The Maurice F. Childs Memorial Lectureship Series honors the memory of Maurice F. Childs—a dedicated preservationist and celebrated architect who co-founded the Boston-based firm CBT Architects. The BAC and CBT have a long professional and personal history: CBT co-founders Maurice F. Childs, Richard Bertman, and Charles Tseckares taught at the BAC, along with other firm employees. CBT continues to employ and mentor many students and alumni. CBT principal, Kishore Varanasi AICP, serves on the BAC Board of Trustees.