About Prof. Hu
Biography
Hu is Clinical Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of our Master of Sustainable Urban Design program. Before joining our faculty, he was Director and Chief Designer of the Research Center for Landscape Architecture at the Beijing Tsinghua Tongheng Urban Planning and Design Institute (THUPDI) and Vice-President of THUPDI overall.
After completing an MLA degree at the University of Illinois, Hu worked for eight years at Sasaki Associates in Watertown, Massachusetts. In 2003, he returned to China to begin work at THUPDI, and he and his team designed dozens of large-scale, transformative landscapes across China, including the 1,680-acre Olympic Forest Park in Beijing and the 1,557-acre Tangshan Nanhu Eco-City Central Park—the latter, an intensive remediation project realized on the site of collapsed coal mines, a dump, and contaminated former factory sites. Hu also designed a major portion of the Winter Olympics site in Beijing for 2022, while his research focuses on application of the Shan-shui City concept to multiscale landscape practices.
In March 2018, Hu won the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. He is a member of the Chinese Council of Landscape Architecture and a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and he has served as a member of the ASLA Council of Fellows Executive Committee.