Kun LI Likes:

Affiliation of Author(s):

建筑学院

Journal:

Rural Architecture. The Memory of the Country. Book of Abstracts INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, ICOMOS ITALY NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE CIAV - 21-22 May 2022

Key Words:

Chinese Traditional Villages, layered morphologies, Italian typo-morphological studies, typological and interpretative map, rural landscape structure

Abstract:

This study is an analysis of the evolutionary mechanism of Chinese historical villages in terms of morphology, based on the Italian tradition of typo-morphological research from inspiration. In the 1970s, Samonà’s proposal of “morphological systems” and “semantic unities” provided conceptual and operational tools for reading urban facts and landscapes for the first time and influenced the urban research between Milan and Venice. Stemming from Samonà’s observations, Pezzetti (2019) developed two concepts to define morphological protection units in her research on the ancient village of Fenghuang (Shaanxi), namely “morphological semantic units” and “latent structures”. The concept proved to be able to recognize composite units of meaning, which despite the diachronic historical process and apparently chaotic recent constructions, still followed the ancient morphologic structure, traces and rites. Based on the above concepts, in this paper, the author investigates historical villages and their surroundings in Hancheng County, Shaanxi Province. On the basis of fieldwork, documentary research and anthropological interviews, a current typological map (the first floor plan of the village as a whole) of the village as a whole, speculative maps of the historical periods, and a series of interpretive maps were produced. The reading of the grammar supports the operability of a co-evolutionary (Della Torre, 2019, Pezzetti, 2019) and constant re-writing (Pezzetti, 2019,2020) producing a dynamic and continuous morphological result. Recent political changes and the infiltration of modernity have brought about changes in land supply patterns and peasant production cooperation, which have led directly to two phenomena: the first is the ‘ill-formed sentence’ that results from the spontaneous re-writing process in traditional Semantic Units. The second is the simplification of grammar during the expansion of the settlement. The process of these phenomena led to the creation of semi-organic and non-organic morphological units. This further study confirms that the different typo-morphological semantic units of traditional Chinese villages can be interpreted and described in terms of the basic syntax of their morphology, beyond the a priori facts of the “forming form” (Muratori, 1963). Besides, the grammar of the traditional organic morphological units is reinforced by the reading of a combination of Feng Shui concepts, numerology, ancient regulations and the free mechanism of buying and selling land. The research results on the grammar of morphological systems will provide a methodological basis and an operational framework for the conservation and development of Chinese traditional villages and the restoration of their traditional forms.

Co-author:

Laura Anna Pezzetti

First Author:

Kun LI

Indexed by:

会议论文

ISSN No.:

ISBN 979-12-210-1036-7

Translation or Not:

no

Date of Publication:

2022-05-20