Drunken nostalgia Vernacular architecture
China has a very long history of natural agriculture, five thousand years of Chinese civilization, basically agricultural civilization. The basis of agricultural civilization is the social life of the countryside. In the vast rural society, mainly peasants, together with small craftsmen, rural intellectuals and merchants from all walks of life who rose up from the countryside in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, together created a deep and magnificent local culture like the ocean. Temple culture, scholar culture and ichijing culture, although they have a great influence on local culture, their roots are rooted in local culture. Compared with the temple culture, the scholar culture and the city culture, the local culture is the culture created by the most people and serves the most people. It is the most simple, the most frank, the most lifelike, and therefore the most humane. Local culture depends on the land, is a regional culture, it does not have a strong convergence like the temple culture, the scholar culture and the city culture, it is ever-changing, more colorful.
Drunken Nostalgia and Architecture Five Books of Moraine Ancient Town, Beijing Publishing House
Vernacular architecture is the stage and material environment of local life, and it is also the most prevalent and information-rich component of vernacular culture. It is the most comprehensive and closely linked to many other local cultural elements and even their important carriers. Without studying vernacular architecture, it is impossible to fully understand the vernacular culture. It can even be said that the study of vernacular architecture is the basis for the study of vernacular cultural systems.
Of course, vernacular architecture is also the most simple, most sincere, most lifely and most humane part of traditional Chinese architecture. They not only have a high historical and cultural cognitive value, but also may have some direct reference value for construction workers. The history of Chinese architecture without vernacular architecture is incomplete.
Our vernacular architecture research starts from the settlement. This is because the vast majority of villagers live in specific feudal patriarchal communities, so the basic way of existence of vernacular architecture is to form settlements. Corresponding to all aspects of the social life of the villagers, as their material conditions, vernacular architecture contains many types, including residential buildings, ceremonial buildings, worship buildings, commercial buildings, public welfare buildings, and cultural and educational buildings. Every building is a system. For example, the Zongmiao Temple, there are the Main Ancestral Hall, the Fang Ancestral Hall, the Branch Ancestral Hall, the Incense Hall and the Ancestral House; for example, the Cultural and Educational Buildings, there are JiaShu, YiShu, Private School, Academy, Wenguan, Confucian Temple, Wenchang (Kuixing) Pavilion, Wenfeng Pagoda, Wenbi, Jinshi Arch and so on. These building systems form an organic system in the settlement, which defines the structure of the settlement, making it a functional whole, meeting the material, cultural and spiritual life needs of the villagers under certain social and historical conditions, as well as the institutional needs of society.
Vernacular life gives vernacular architecture a rich cultural connotation, and we strive to study the connection between vernacular architecture and vernacular life, so we regard vernacular architecture as a basic part of vernacular culture to study. The architectural system of the settlement is an organic whole, and we strive to focus our research on the whole of the settlement, on the relationship between the various buildings and the whole and the interrelationship between them, on the relationship between the settlement as a whole and its parts with the natural environment and the historical environment. Local culture is not isolated, it is the common foundation of temple culture, scholar culture, and city culture, and they are inextricably linked. Local life is not completely closed, and it is inextricably linked to all areas of life of the entire society of an era. We seek to study vernacular architecture in these relationships. For example, the vernacular architecture of the "Nine Sides" in the early years of the Ming Dynasty changed with the relaxation of the military situation, for example, the vernacular architecture in Jiangnan and Jinzhong changed with the development of the commodity economy at the end of the Ming Dynasty. Settlements are shaped over a relatively long period of time, and this formation process contains rich historical and cultural content, and we hope that there are enough materials to allow us to do dynamic research on settlements. In short, our research methods synthesize the various methods of architecture, history, folklore, sociology, and cultural anthropology. The synthesis of methods is determined by the inherent complexity of the vernacular and the multifaceted nature of external connections.
Drunken nostalgia and architecture five books
"Guoyu Village", "Four Villages of Tanbu Town, Guangzhou", "Moraine Ancient Town", "Two Villages under DaciYan", "Hakka Ancient Village in Western Fujian - Peitian"
Beijing Publishing House
From a series of studies, we hope that the settlements selected for research topics will have different types at all levels: there are pure agricultural villages, there are villages that have been transformed from agriculture to commerce and handicrafts; there are cave villages, there are villages with carved beams and paintings; there are mountain villages and seaside villages; there are uneven horse head walls, there are also stilt houses, and there are different ethnic groups in different regions. In this way, we can get closer to the whole picture of China's vernacular architecture step by step, although this journey is very long. In distinguishing between categories and selecting typical examples of indigenous settlements at various levels, we use a meticulous comparative method. It is to find the characteristic factors of each settlement, which must be comparable to each other, essential within the settlement, and universal between or within the types.
Because our research is salvage- and salvage-oriented, we do not choose settlements that are already famous in the world as research topics, but instead discover obscure but valuable settlements. Such a topic is difficult: the settlement should be more mature, the building type is relatively complete, the building quality is good, and there are genealogies, inscriptions and other documents. Of course, the settlement must be quite well preserved, the old one is not too damaged, and the new one is not too much. But many of the most elaborate or typical villages of the past half century have ceased to exist, and we have little freedom of choice.
Because it is a series of books, we try to avoid duplication between the books and pay attention to the characteristics of each book. The characteristics mainly come from the settlement itself, when selecting the topic, we pay special attention to their characteristics, and in the process of research, we deepen the exploration. Secondly, from our way of writing, not only choose different angles and emphases as much as possible, but even change the genre style of the text. Some general generalizations, we put in one book, the other books will not repeat more and more. As for which book it is written in, it depends on various conditions. Only by writing about the particularity of the subject matter can we write a little bit about the richness and diversity of Chinese vernacular architecture. Therefore, excavating the particularity of the subject matter is the entry point for us to start research, and we must make greater efforts.
The writing time of each book in this series is very short, because we dare not delay in a subject, the work is a little shallow, but we still do the work seriously, and we will not be hasty. Although we can only get a small spoonful of water from the vast ocean, this spoonful of water carries the full taste of the ocean after all. Hopefully, our series of books will pique the reader's interest in vernacular architecture, and that more people will be happy to study them and thus selectively preserve the most valuable parts of it.
This article was published in Gansu Daily on March 26, 2020
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