The ruins of the temple in Search of Love
Literature and architecture have a very close relationship, not only because architecture and literature have many similarities in aesthetics, but also because architecture is often the object of observation and description by literary artists, and it is the scene and space in which literary works show plots and lay out stories. In Chinese literature, architecture is the carrier for literary artists to express their feelings, and there are countless popular poems and words describing pavilions in history. Architecture integrates man and nature on the same level, expressing the ideal of the unity of heaven and man.
The city and urban life on which architecture and architecture depend also shape literature, stimulating the imagination and creative inspiration of literary artists. A considerable part of culture is nurtured by our cities, which occupy the central position of culture and thus play an important central role in literature. The influence of architecture, cities and urban life on literature, and between literature and architecture, cities and urban life is a continuous dual construction.
Ancient Chinese Literature and Architecture
Grand View Garden Imagination Map
The Grand View Garden has an overall bird's eye view
Ancient Chinese architecture and literature have long been inextricably linked. While the ancients built buildings, they also built a treasure trove of architectural literature. Literature throughout the ages has left many chapters that vividly describe architecture, and the documents related to ancient architecture include poems, songs, travelogues, essays, inscriptions, etc. These literary works are very rich and colorful in terms of literary genres, themes, techniques, or styles and artistic conceptions, and have great achievements not only in the artistic level, but also in architectural discourse.
The Book of Poetry has many chapters about architecture, and the Shi Xiaoya has a poem that praises the completion of the Palace of the Zhou Dynasty, "Si Gan", in which the temple is likened to: "Like the wings of the grass, like the thorns of yasi." Like the bird Si Ge, like the Fei Si Fei, the gentleman is in the same place. This means that the posture of the palace building is as tall as a person lifting his heel to look far away, and some are as upright as arrow feathers, and the four corners of the roof are like birds spreading their wings and flying like birds, which has become the prototype of people's understanding of Chinese architectural forms in ancient times.
There are many literary works that can be included in the professional literature of architecture, but when the buildings such as buildings, palaces, pavilions, pavilions and other buildings are completed, there are many inscriptions, inscriptions, poems or lexicographic records, and the works of praise or remembrance of future generations of literati and inkers will also be handed down. Tang Dynasty poet Wang Bo's "Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion", Du Mu's "Afang Gongfu", Song Dynasty politician and poet Fan Zhongyan's "Yueyang Lou", essayist Ouyang Xiu's "Drunken Pavilion", etc., are all unique songs throughout the ages. The design of the roof of the great lecture hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing was inspired by the famous phrase "Autumn water is long and the sky is colorful" in the "Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion".
Cao Xueqin's description of the Grand View Garden, Rong Guo Mansion and Ning Guo Mansion in "Dream of the Red Chamber" has aroused the reverie of many literati and architects, trying to find the buildings that have been submerged by history from the book, and trying to reconstruct the author's fictional "Grand View Garden". "Dream of the Red Chamber" shapes a grand view garden that integrates the characteristics of gardens and architecture in the south and the north, and expresses the aesthetic theory, garden art, and gardening techniques of classical Chinese gardens in literary and artistic language. The novel "Dream of the Red Chamber" integrates architecture into literary works and describes the changes in architectural space, involving 82 buildings and scenes in the book, a total of 155 kinds of buildings and architectural spaces, components, furniture, etc., and more than 30 kinds of doors.
Architecture in literature
Watercolor Notre Dame cathedral
Notre Dame is also famous thanks to Hugo's novel Notre Dame de Paris. The author describes this magnificent building in great detail with great knowledge. Hugo wrote: "The greatest product of architecture is not the creation of individuals, but the creation of society, which is not so much the work of geniuses as the crystallization of the people's labor; it is the precipitation left by a nation, the accumulation formed over the centuries, the crystallization of the successive sublimation of human society, time is the architect, the people are masons." ”
Modeled after this medieval building, Hugo has been imagined and recreated on a scale that goes far beyond the complexity of the building's exterior. Hugo provides vivid concrete scenes for the story, and the city and architecture become the themes of the novel, but at the same time, the environment in which the whole story is laid out. In order to write this church, Hugo consulted a large number of documents and carefully examined medieval art, and his call to protect ancient architecture, especially Gothic architecture, caused a huge response in society, thus setting off a "Revival Movement of Gothic Art" in France. Since then, thousands of ancient buildings have been restored and preserved to this day.
The Romantic Novel by the Italian Renaissance architect Colonna, The Dream of Polifilo (1499), had an important influence on the palace and garden architecture of France and Italy in the 17th century. The textual descriptions and illustrations in the book become the inspiration for the generation of architecture. The novel tells the story of a travel dream of the protagonist, Polifilo, in which he describes the palace, temple, and theater he encounters. With 115 woodcuts depicting temples, pyramids, obelisks, figures, gardens, pools, wells, temple interiors, vases, ornaments, etc., the novel had an important influence on later literature, art, and architecture. The architectural concepts of Bramante, an Italian architect, painter and one of the representatives of Renaissance architecture, were influenced by this novel, and the ancient Roman style expressed in the observation tower of St. Peter's Basilica, which he designed, borrowed from the descriptions in the book, and his utopian ideas were also inspired by the mysterious fantasy of "In Search of Love".
On November 2, 2020 local time, affected by the epidemic, the gardens of Versailles were inaccessible (Visual China)
The garden art of the Palace of Versailles was also influenced by The Dream of Love. The archetype of The colonnade of Louis XIV's architect and urban planner Mansard comes from The Dream of Love, and many of the designs directly mimic some of the chapters in the book. Brondale, then president of the Royal Academy of Architectural Sciences, architect and architectural theorist, listed The Dream of Love as one of the most useful reference books for the study of architecture, and the 18th-century Italian architectural theorist Milicia (1725-1798) called the author of the novel the greatest architect of all time.
Another novel set in famous buildings is Kinkaku-ji Temple, written in 1956 by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, a novel based on the true story of Kinkaku. The book describes the eternal beauty of kinkaku and the obstacles this beauty to man's secular spirit. Built around 1398 and painted with gold leaf, kinkaku is a precious cultural heritage, destroyed by fire in 1950 and rebuilt in 1955. The novel faithfully recounts the burning of the Kinkaku, in which a stuttering monk set fire to the Kinkaku because he could not bear the architectural beauty of the Kinkaku. The novel devotes many pages to the beauty of architecture, the beauty of a detail combined with the whole, and the beauty of any part contains the foreshadowing of another kind of beauty.
Italian writer Calvino's The Invisible City (1972) is a postmodern novel full of semantic semiotic metaphors that express people's ideals for the future city and architecture. The main line of the book is that Marco Polo reports to Kublai Khan the strange stories of the cities he experienced on his missions, which can be summarized into 11 themes. Cities and architecture use images, spaces, archetypes, structures, materials, and scenes to lay out the author's views on the human condition. Calvino saw the city and its architecture as a text, a text that was meaningful and decipherable. Through people's living and living, everyone is constantly writing about the city. Calvino completely mixes historical facts and novels, allowing readers to have enough imagination to make multiple interpretations, so that this special architectural image has a kind of openness. Calvino traces the story back to Marco Polo's time in order to open up the gap between himself and history, dissolve time, and thus seek value in "history". Calvino spoke of the ideal of a "non-ideal city" through Marco Polo, a city of reality, not a pure, exemplary city.
The Polish-American architect Ribeski was deeply influenced by the literature of the Irish writer and poet Joyce, who sought not only the visible but also the invisible. In his memoirs (2004), he said:
"Great architecture, like great literature, or poetry and music, tells the story of the human soul. It allows us to see the world in a whole new way, and it has changed since then. ”
Literature generates architecture
Kinkaku-ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan
"Dream of the Red Chamber", "Notre Dame de Paris" and "Kinkaku Temple" can all be called "architectural literature", a kind of literature based on architectural interpretation, and at the same time presents a kind of "literary architecture", a literary-generated architecture. Architectural literature has an important position in literature and art, including the biography of architects, the notes of architects, literary works with architects as the protagonist, and literary works with the description of architecture and cities as the core.
The French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire's science fiction novel Mikromegas (1752) tells the story of the adventures of a man named Mikromegas who lived on Sirius and traveled through the universe. Polish-American architect Ribeskin published a series of surrealist architectural paintings in 1979, borrowing the name of Voltaire's novel, that violated the rules of common perception. Similar to the interpretation of the text, it shows a certain openness. The architectural surreal ideas expressed are neither physical nor spatially poetic.
The Italian architect Terrani designed the Dante's Memorial in 1938, in which he strove to pursue classical perfection and express the theme of poetry and architecture. Dante (1256-1321) was a great Italian poet, a pioneer of the Renaissance movement, and Terrani's design used architecture to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy, which used elevated squares, rigorous geometric relations and golden ratios. The three sets of architectural spaces are metaphors for the three components of the Divine Comedy: hell, purgatory and heaven, and the architects tried to combine classicism with the spatial forms of modern architecture with a golden ratio, realizing the contrast between space and substance, darkness and light, wide and narrow.
Literature and architecture mingle with each other, and writers also get inspiration from architecture. The writer's description is not so much a narrative of architecture as it is a writer borrowing a topic to play, allowing readers to join their own associations and read architecture in an open way. Zhai Yongming, a contemporary Chinese poet, said in an essay: "When I am reading, or when I write, I often see or imagine from the lines of words a composition, a kind of physical architecture that exists only between heaven and earth or in life, and I find among them some secrets that deserve my attention, those logics that are also infused in architecture, which transcend the beauty presented to us by the surface of things." ”
Architects and Literature
Unbuilt Monument of Dante (renderings)
Architects have a wide range of fields of expertise, their interests and hobbies are very extensive, and many architects have a good literary attainment, writing poems, essays and essays. Architects not only use architectural works to express ideas, express aesthetic concepts, and express architectural ideas, but also express rationally and poetically with words and words. Architecture is poetic, and architects should be artists, writers, and poets.
Lin Huiyin is a famous architect and a famous Crescent poet, known as a generation of talented women, and has published many biographies and articles about her. She was also an excellent poet and writer, writing many articles on architecture and the city, and her literary achievements and academic achievements in the field of architecture can be said to be incomparable. The predecessors of the architectural industry have studied in the East and the West, have excellent literary skills, and have a large number of poems preserved, mostly involving landscape gardens, scenic spots, natural scenery and architectural creation.
Ma Guoxin, a polyamorous artist who loves poetry, painting, photography and calligraphy, discusses the relationship between architecture and literature: "Literature and architecture are both arts that use a special language. Literature uses literary language as a means of expression, and its way of expression is very free, and the technique and depth are almost unlimited; architecture uses architectural language as a means of expression, and its way of expression is limited by technology. Literature needs rhetoric, architecture needs decoration. ”
Liu Jiakun is an accomplished architect who began to write novels as early as the late period of his childhood to Wenjiang as a zhiqing, and published short stories when he was in college, which can be said that his literary creation predates architectural creation. Novels and architecture are the two main ways of Liu Jiakun's artistic creation, his aesthetic ideals, the pursuit of the artistry of style and language in architectural works, the strong subject narrative language and the "wandering path" that form the characteristics of his architectural works.
The famous work "The Coronation of Napoleon" by the French painter Jacques-Louis David depicts the coronation of Napoleon and his queen Josephine held in Notre Dame Cathedral
The American architect Moore used words as freely as he used building materials to express, with rich expressiveness. He once quoted the English poet Eliot as a whole book on the meaning of the garden: "The immature poet imitates, the mature poet steals, the inferior poet destroys other people's things, and the good poet makes it better, at least makes it different." "Lieberskin's memoirs talk about life, about life, about history, about architecture and architects, about the city, about his own design ideas and experiences, about art, about painting and painters, about music and musicians, about movies, etc., almost everything can be said.
Architects are often described as a legendary figure in literature, and the Russian-American philosopher and writer Rand praised the architect in his novel The Fountainhead (1943): "For centuries there have always been people who take the first steps on new paths with their bare hands and their own aspirations, and the great creators—thinkers, artists, scientists, inventors—face their times alone." Every great new idea has been denied, every great new invention has been denied, but they still move forward. They think, they suffer and they give, but they win. The novel shows the difficult transition of American architecture from eclecticism to modern architecture, and the contradictions and conflicts between modernism and conservative American architecture from Europe, architects and society and owners become the main line of the novel. The novel also reveals how the media created or destroyed an architect, and it was the novel that turned Wright and the Flowing House into the stars of American architecture, promoting not only Wright but also modern architecture.
Author: Zheng Shiling (Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor of Tongji University)
Editor: Zhou Minxian
Editor-in-Charge: Xuanjing
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.