A Study On The Traditional Settlements And Its Public Buildings In The Middle Reaches Of The Yangtze River Based On The Perspective Of “Context-Text” Theory

Settlement can be generally described as spatial and temporal process and form of human being’s living,settling and survival by gathering in a crowd.Settlement research in architecture has been more concerned about the planning,design and construction of settlements.With the accumulation and development of academic research,settlement has been given the meaning of diversity in the awareness of people in order to reveal the phenomenon of settlement and the laws and nature behind its operation and development.For further discussion about the meaning of settlement,the author intends to make a theoretical reflection on the phenomenon of settlement by returning to “people”,the core and root of the existence of settlement in this paper.According to historical materialism and its philosophy of history,settlement is considered the process and form of human being’s practice as well as the carrier and results of such practice based on the methods and results of the researches on settlement from five subjects,viz.,anthropology,sociology,archeology,geography and architecture.At the same time,“settlement is a way of human existence”,a new concept about settlement,is put forward.Accordingly,the research approach of this paper is not to study settlement based on architecture but to study architecture by taking settlement as a dynamic whole.In this way,settlement and its buildings can be understood in a more macroscopic and comprehensive perspective system.Accordingly,in terms of research method,the “linguistic turn” in current philosophy and architecture is considered and the linguistic method is borrowed to further expand and complete the theoretical reflection about the phenomenon of settlement and its meaning,and then the logic structure and text hierarchy are presented to interpret the meaning of settlement.The three levels are region,settlement and architecture,and the upper level is the “context” of the lower level while the lower level is the “text” of the upper level.Based on this theoretical framework,an empirical research about the traditional settlements and their public buildings in the rural area of the Yangtze River is carried out in this paper under the new concept of settlement.On the one hand,the middle reaches of the Yangtze River are typical region of the Yangtze River Basin and even around China and the traditional settlements here are fairly typical too;on the other hand,rural public buildings are the core of settlement systems and the main bearer of the meaning of settlement.Therefore,the author intends to deepen the understanding and discussion about the connotation and extension of settlement by way of “from point to surface”.According to the linguistic principle of interpreting text based on context to probe its meaning,the components and characteristics of the “context” of traditional settlement,with the “region” of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and its sub language families as its content,are investigated,covering two levels,viz.,the outer context dominated by the large environment of the Yangtze River area(including natural and semi-artificial and human factors)and the inner context superficially represented by vernaculars but actually differentiated by cultures(four regional dialect families).Traditional settlement has the double property of “text” and “context” by acting as an intermediate link between “region” and “architecture”.As a settlement “text” under the regional “context”,it features a superficial structure based on form level as well as the deep meaning of gathering due to predestined relationship and settling due to living and working in peace and contentment;as the settlement “context” of rural public buildings,it shows itself a construction type context affecting the construction of buildings(such as the natural impact of selecting building locations)and non-construction type context affecting the connotation of buildings(such as socio-cultural system).For rural public “buildings”,the author includes the research on “place” in “architecture phenomenology” into the theoretical frame of “context-text” interpretation of “traditional settlement-rural public buildings” in this paper and interprets the “text” of rural public buildings from three aspects respectively,viz.,subject-place spirit and deep structure,object-place function and middle-level structure and carrier-space of places and superficial structure.To sum up,the author has initially built a settlement system research framework based on linguistic method,established the logic relationship between the research objects of settlement and made some new explorations in terms of research perspective,research method,research object,academic viewpoints,etc.in this paper.The author attempts to make some tentative research and theoretical work to establish the scientific research system of settlement through the complete logic process.