Study On The Harbin "Art Nouveau" Window Decorations

The era of Harbin Art Nouveau was opened with the building of Middle East Railway in1898. It is one of the most important and distinctive architectural styles in modern Harbin buildings. Moreover, various construction types and scales make it worthy of more researching. The window decoration is one of the important parts of a building. It has played a significant role in both the performance of the architectural artistic characteristics and reflecting the architectural decorative style and cultural connotations. The windows of Harbin Art Nouveau style buildings convey information through their own shapes and decorative patterns in order to reflect the cultural connotations and artistic features of these buildings. Through investigating the window decorations, morphological features and decorative techniques were summarized. As well, the Symbol Characteristics of the decorations were studied further in this paper.Ⅰ. Through analyzing the background and historical status of the Europe Art Nouveau buildings, their emergence and development were discussed in this paper. With the prevalence of the Art Nouveau culture and the Russia cultural renaissance, Art Nouveau combined with the Russian culture, and formed the unique Russian Art Nouveau buildings. This was the basis of forming the Harbin Art Nouveau buildings. According to this, the development course of the Harbin Art Nouveau buildings and their windows were analyzed in details in this paper.Ⅱ. Through specifically analyzing the basic shapes and decorative patterns of Harbin Art Nouveau windows, the basic morphology of these windows and several morphological characteristics of their decorations were summed up. Combined with aesthetic principles, we analyzed the aesthetic characteristics contained in these Harbin Art Nouveau buildings and their windows.Ⅲ. Via analyzing the basic forms of the symbols used in the architectural window decorations, we deeply researched the symbol characteristics, which could offer some help in the future studying and the inheritance of Harbin Art Nouveau symbols.Starting from the architectural window decorations of Harbin Art Nouveau buildings, we did a lot of field researches. With the combination of related theories of aesthetics and so on, we summarized the symbol characteristics of the architectural window decoration shapes of Harbin Art Nouveau. Then we studied the details of these decorations, in order to see the big picture and to discuss the overall decorative forms of the Art Nouveau windows. Not only a new level of understanding showed by people, but also the profound applications of this work in aesthetic issues’solving, and it being the theoretical basis for contemporary architectural design were all we were expecting.