Quantitative Research On The Integrated Form Of The Two-dimensional Plan To Traditional Rural Settlement

The traditional rural settlements are formed from assembling single residential houses, the converged methods of which will build the settlement integrated form and define the relationship between the inside and outside. Compared with the form of a single building, the integrated form displays the natural primitive features of a settle-ment better. The previous settlement research paid less attention to the integrated form than the forms of the single buildings, not to speak of the scientific quantitative re-search. This paper focuses on the master plan of the settlement with the outlines of every single building as basic units. With a view to the figure-ground relationship, it decomposes the settlement integrated form into three elements:boundary (line), space (plane), buildings (group). And these three elements respectively correspond to three aspects:shape, structure and order. By using landscape ecology, fractal geometry, computer-aided programming and statistics methods as reference, this research tries to be scientific and quantified.The first part discusses the settlement boundary shape. The settlement boundary is formed by the building solid borders and the virtual ones in-between. Three virtual borders:100M,30M and7M are used to define the closed settlement boundary figure. With the weighted average shape indexes of these three closed boundary plans and the ratio of the length of the shaft, the first part classifies quantitatively the settlement boundary shapes as round, strip and star-shaped, for the further discussion of the gen-eral characters of the settlement boundary forms. Moreover, with three of the quanti-tative indexes of space attributes, including the density, discrete degree of the settle-ment boundary, and the average width of fringe space, the local characteristics of set-tlement boundary shape are also discussed in this part.The second part goes into the settlement space structure. The settlement internal space is decomposed to relatively regular enclosed space and relatively irregular pub-lic open space. In one aspect, courtyard space ratio is counted, base on the defined area by the building outline. In another, the figure patch of settlement public space is obtained by extending the settlement boundary2.5M outside. Then the fractal dimen-sion is calculated to find out the degree of settlement structuralization. Through these two independent parameters, this part discusses the characteristics of settlement spa-tial structuralization.The third part tries to explore orders within the construction groups. Through computer programming, diagrams showing the network of building nodes at a certain scope are illustrate. And then, every single building area, angle deviation and mutual minimum distance are derived according to the diagrams. Through the statistic of these figures, three partial disorder coefficients and a comprehensive disorder coeffi-cient are refined, in order to explore the characteristics of orders within the construc-tion groups in settlements.Finally, through the above quantitative research on the integrated form of the two-dimensional plan to traditional rural settlement, a set of quantitative index system is summarized. More than the abstract planning indicators, more specific and accurate morphological description is supposed to be provided, which will be used to explore the internal mechanism of settlement forms. Meanwhile, the commentary, classifica-tion and comparison among settlements will be accomplished.