A Study On The Visual Features Of City Streets

The city street is not only an important carrier of city life, but also an essential element of structuring the city texture and reflecting the city culture and characteristics. Meanwhile the most direct impression of a city that people felt comes from the city street.Kevin Lynch classified streets into the five elements of a city impression in his The Image of the City. Yoshinobu Ashihara wrote in The Aesthetic Townscape,"Think of a city, and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city's streets look interesting, the city looks interesting. If they look dull, the city looks dull."Wu Liangyong once said:"If the traditional association space of Europe lies mainly in the square, the counterpart in Chinese and Japanese tradition of European square is the street."So the image of the city streets is directly related to the city's appearance.From the perspective of visual features, the visual environment of city streets is more vivid and tensile in the various visual environments. Therefore, it is important to unify the distinctive visual symbols of city streets and combine all these elements in city streets which can represent their distinctive visual features and spiritual symbols. According to the results of the visual experience, we can study the culture and phenomenon of the city; summarize the majority's living condition. By doing these we can avoid the embarrassing phenomenon of lacking vigor and variety. In this way we can live in distinctive city streets of various styles.This research comprehensively analyzes the streets through many aspects such as their visual images, essential visual elements, manifestations and features by using theories of environmental art, aesthetics, and psychology and so on. It is filled with the concept of unique, culture, and humanization. The constructive advices are hoped to serve as a reference for visual construction of Qingdao and visual theory of city streets.