| Urban color plays an irreplaceable role in shaping the image of a city. In the context of the mega-trend of globalization and rapid urbanization, employing color to express a city’s regional culture and highlight a city’s unique quality is an important approach to promoting a city’s development in its uniqueness. Currently, as far as the urban color in China is concerned, there is a tendency of all cities losing their regional unique features for the homogenization of urban colors; on the other hand, cities are polluted by colors as colors are used willfully in an unregulated and unplanned fashion. Urban color is now a pressing matter of strategic significance in that it is directly related to the improvement of our living environment and the ultimate goal of our urbanization-poetic dwelling. But regretfully there lacks a systematic urban color design approach in China to tackle this urgent problem.A city has strong regional uniqueness and culture. As science develops and one-dimensional economic man emerges, the city has embarked on a strayed path where material civilization is measured as the human being’s progress. The subjects of the city feel more and more intensely the loss of identity, the erosion of personality, and the depletion of spirit. As economy and technology has the fundamental characteristics of challenging-forth, setting-upon, and calculating, it makes people judge and negate all the time in the process of satisfying their vanity and selfish desire, so that they can never get peace in their souls. People hope to relieve from the pressures of the city’s cultural and physical environments and live a relatively free life after the subsistence supported by "necessities".The ideal state of existence is that where the subjects of the city can realize themselves. Only at that state can the subjects of the city recover their identities and reveal the goodness and purity in their nature. Therefore, the goal of urban color design is to realize the humanistic care to the subjects of the city, help them to dwell poetically in the city, and return to the true self of human beings.This dissertation analyzes the state and features of the subjects’ existence of the city, and deduces that "poetic dwelling" is the ultimate goal of the city’s development. Subsequently, this paper posits that the soul of the subjects of a city is the fundamentals of the study on urban color, through analyzing the aesthetic feeling of the subjects’ poetic dwelling (artistic existence) state. This dissertation innovates in the theory of urban image system, focusing on the research on the recognition of urban color, systematically studying the features of image recognition, the condition of the generation of image recognition and the generation mode. The historical and cultural structure of a city has its unchangeable personalized elements, of which the idea of goodness and purity is the key to forging a city’s unique urban color. The ideal urban color is one of the paths leading the subjects of the city to the revelation of their spiritual concepts of goodness and purity. With this idea, this paper deduces that the designing principle of urban color image is the identity of collective subconscious spirit of the subjects of the city and the aesthetic feeling of the urban color.Different from the perspectives of other institutes’urban color study, urban color in this dissertation is used in its general sense, i.e., the spatial color on the macro level in its entirety, which refers to the urban color of a historical stage along the time axis, but does not limit to the urban color of a point in time or space. Reviewing the research approaches to urban color adopted by various institutes at home and abroad, this paper finds that the deficiencies of present urban color research lie in the lack of humanistic care for the subjects of the city, and the only emphasis on the harmony of the physical properties of urban color. Therefore, this paper puts a stress on the relationship between the subjects of the city and the urban color, and strives to avoid the limitation of sticking to the coordination of the visual effects of colors used in a city.This is an inter-disciplinary research which draws on theories, such as positivism, humanism, semiotics, phenomenology, aestheticism, and existentialism, studies systematically the urban color image from the perspective of art design. In order for the subjects of the city to realize artistic existence and enable the city to present its local cultural features, this dissertation constructs a complete system of urban color designing. Employing scientific analysis to explore the design of urban color, takes the spiritual concepts of the subjects of the city as the idea source of urban color design, and proposes a viable solution, which includes an evaluation system of the thematic culture of a city, the determining principle for the concepts of a city, the approaches to transforming city spiritual concepts into urban color image, the means of determining the conceptual color spectrum for a city, and the procedure of regulating urban color as well as actual cases for demonstrative purpose.This dissertation is meant to build a theory to foster good urban color image, develop unique locality spirit for the city, seek the city subjects’identification with the urban space, communicate the city’s unique rational civilization of harmonious existence of human and the nature, and build an ideal home for the city community, thereby realizing the real goal of city development-"poetic dwelling"... |
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