The Placeness Interpretation Of Vernacular Settlement Landscape

Vernacular landscape is a kind of regional culture landscape which covers geographical environment, social constructions, life styles and aesthetic tendency in rural regions. The existing ancient Bayu riverside towns are typical space carriers of vernacular landscape. They are records of the vernacular settlement environment evolution, as well as reflections of Bayu regional life style, customs and morals. Currently, with the establishment of Three Gorges and the fast-speed urbanization, the natural and social environment has been changed so much. Most of the vernacular landscape had sicked into the river or ruined, except seldom towns or cultural relics have been preserved. The vernacular landscape of Bayu riverside towns intends to be cracked and faulted both in space and value.In view of above, the Field Theory which combines space with experience is referred as the framework of the paper. Besides, the paper adopts interdisciplinary research methods such as phenomenology, semiotics, typology and so on; it bases itself on “insider” imagery life mode of vernacular society, and divides vernacular society into four portions: daily life landscape, production landscape, faith landscape and rural places of interest. Then systematically analyzes the field context of Bayu riverside vernacular landscape, involving the temporal and spatial evolution of climate, terrain, landforms, collective memories, society levels, customs and many other cultural or geographical background from the aspects of “on the ground” natural system and “anwesenheit” cultural system.By means of various field serve and literature review, the paper acknowledges the definition of vernacular landscape should be comprised by spatial environment and individual experience. In the light of relationships between human and human, human and god, human and universe, then distinguishes life environment, god environment and universe environment which treats “wharf”, “nine palaces and eighteen temples”, “eight sights” as representatives respectively. When analyzed the origin pedigree, spatial type, topological image and situational experience, we could safely draw that, the land texture and living space are real places of life and production, such as “wharf”; the halls and temples are mental places of communicating with gods, such as “nine palaces and eighteen temples”; and the natural landscape is an ideal place of philosophy, aesthetic, humanism and nature fusion, such as “eight sights”.In summary, the unfolding of vernacular landscape field “space” and “meaning” can be divided into three dimensions——field, site and situation. The match and combination of them forms the Placeness of vernacular landscape which emphasizes the fusion of forms and meaning and the daily uses. The generating mechanism of vernacular landscape placeness is a gradual acculturation which holds four dynamic life cycles: gathering, anchoring, identification and conversion. But the perception mechanism of vernacular landscape placeness is an abrupt emergency which deals with subject presence of perceptual intuition, perceptual experience, meaning decoding, and to some extent, spatial distance and psychological distance.