The Yan, Xiang And Yi Of Traditional Architecture Modern Expression

Chinese ancient buildings went through thousands of years, they are closely related to the development process of Chinese civilization, the architecture and the culture have become inseparable whole. Although the system of Chinese ancient buildings' form does not continue to nowadays because of social and historical factors and so on, large number of ancient remains, books and the memory from generation to generation let modern people keep accepting traditional cultural values from Chinese architecture imperceptible, and form understanding and concerning slowly for the traditional architecture. In the modern society of increasing economy, the revival of national culture that people demand has become more and more strongly, it also promotes to put more traditional spirit and content into new works in architecture designing.For understanding and researching the existence and evolution of traditional architecture culture better, the paper borrows the concepts of Yan, Xiang and Yi from Chinese classical philosophy. By analyzing the methods of expressing traditional buildings in modern architecture in different periods and forms, performances in Yan, Xiang and Yi three different level have been generalized. These new and old modern architecture use their own languages to revert traditional buildings' appearance, charm and even image in varying degrees. The skills become mature slowly over time and continuous exploration, and provide a colorful architecture culture feast for modern Chinese. According to the rough understanding of categories in Yan, Xiang and Yi, the modern expression of traditional architecture is discussed by the following way.From the early 20th century to the fifties and sixties, the senior architects summarized and considered Chinese classical architecture form in different perspectives while studying and absorbing foreign architecture's advantages, and used them into architecture designing at that time. To a certain extent, this is a preliminary exploration of new areas, and it's the most intuitive awareness and expression for the traditional architecture culture. So Classical Revival Form, Chinese Classical Form, Chinese Inherent Type and National Form etc. in this period are summarized as the category of Yan, it represent the formal ideas of reproduce traditional buildings in the original way. It belonged to figurative imitation and mimicry.After the exploration during early modern and contemporary, the development of China modern architecture expresses a new diversity situation. Under the influence of western postmodernism, a lot of modern buildings use the designing technique of symbolic traditional architecture elements spontaneously, which takes roof, Dougong, pane, brick wall, decorative pattern and other traditional building's component and features into modern architecture designing in different ways and levels. In this way the function, technology and materials of building would be guaranteed, and the features of traditional architecture would be reflected to a certain extent too. This way of symbolic traditional architecture elements intents to get rid of pure traditional form, to break the obvious limit between tradition and modern, finding a fuzzy state of both modern and traditional. Therefore, it is summarized as Xiang category, represent the extraction and reconstruction of traditional buildings'elements, and it's a method to achieve traditional architecture experience through the fuzzy image.According to the philosophy theory that Getting Image While Forgetting Language and Getting Meaning While Forgetting Image, the research of Yan and Xiang both point to the final target, Yi. On the subject of traditional architecture modern expression, Yi could be understood as reflecting traditional architecture's artistic conception on modern buildings without specific language and image. By discussing the profile, space, color and other respects, pure artistic conception expression is summarized as the category Yi that modern architects committed to, it represents the designing method of expressing the beauty of artistic conception of traditional architecture abstractly while reducing the form itself as far as possible.