THE BIG FEET AESTHETIC AND THE ART OF SURVIVAL The ancient tradition of foot binding in China sacrificed the function of rustic ‘big feet’ in the name of gentrification and beauty. Kongjian Yu espouses an approach to landscape design that celebrates the aesthetic of high-performing, low-cost, healthy feet. Through his description of three projects, located in very different regions of China, he explains how working, adaptive landscapes based on farming techniques can provide an environment with a self-sustaining identity. If I were to talk of the identity of Chinese culture in general – and design culture in particular – I would make a distinction between ‘low’ and ‘high’, or elite culture. Low culture makes the daily life of the normal Chinese possible – especially that of the peasants. Here, design is a technique for adaptation. It is ‘the art of survival’: the art of levelling the earth and irrigating and growing crops; the pleasure of the harvest; and the celebration that follows – useful and beautiful. By contrast, we have high culture, the art of pleasure-making and ornament. Ornamental gardening is the cultivation of trees to blossom rather than bear fruit. It is a beautiful but useless pursuit, like the notorious Chinese tradition of foot binding that sacrificed the function of rustic ‘big feet’ in the name of gentrification and beauty – the ‘little feet aesthetic’. Our society has been misled by the ‘little feet aesthetic’. Elite culture has prioritised its own definition of beauty and good taste, while ‘rustic’, high-performing, low-cost, healthy ‘big feet’ culture has been patronised and neglected. A re-appreciation of low culture requires a ‘big feet aesthetic’. World cities, and especially those in China, face deepening environmental problems: flood, drought, pollution, aquifer drop, loss of natural habitat and cultural heritage. A low-culture approach using what I term ‘adaptive design’ provides a technique for solving problems in an economical and ecological way. Place-making can be achieved with monumental architecture, but this type of identity is forged at great expense. It is easily superseded. Instead, like a successful organism, a place will sustain its identity when its design is adaptive – when it responds elegantly and efficiently to its environmental setting so that new uses can endure. This is the art of survival. The following three projects, located in distinctly different parts of China, demonstrate that working, adaptive landscapes based on farming techniques can provide an environment with a self-sustaining identity. Each is a testimony to the ‘big feet aesthetic’. Kongjian Yu BEIJING MAY 2012 72