Chinese language panorama architect Kongjian Yu died in a airplane crash late on Tuesday within the huge Brazilian wetlands of Mato Grosso do Sul state, Brazilian authorities stated on Wednesday.
Yu, 62, gained international relevance as a panorama architect and concrete planner after the Chinese language authorities adopted his idea of “sponge cities” utilizing nature-based options to soak up and retain water as a substitute of concrete infrastructure to channel it away.
The idea has since been adopted in a whole lot of locations in China in addition to city areas from the U.S. to Russia.
Brazilian authorities confirmed that Yu and three different individuals, the pilot and two native filmmakers, have been killed when the plane they have been travelling in crashed in a rural space close to the city of Aquidauana, within the Pantanal wetlands.
“It was with unhappiness and dismay that I obtained the information of the airplane crash,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva stated in a press release.
“In occasions of local weather change, Kongjian Yu turned a world reference with the sponge cities which mix high quality of life and environmental safety,” he added.

Yu was featured within the opening program of the Sao Paulo Worldwide Structure Biennale final week. Newspaper Estadao reported that he then joined a visit with filmmakers taking pictures a documentary about his work.
Peking College’s School of Structure and Panorama, which Yu based and led as a professor and dean, and Turenscape, a Beijing-based design agency Yu based in 1998, didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark outdoors regular working hours.
Yu has led Turenscape because the agency’s principal designer, rising it right into a staff of greater than 500 specialists, in keeping with the corporate’s web site.