Analysis On Traditional Chinese Gardens With Shallow Space Theories And The Practice Of Fenghe6Garden

Within the process of the economic development and cultural revival of China, agroup of Chinese scholars and architects start to devote themselves to the research ofTraditional Chinese Garden space, which has led to many successful practices.Nevertheless, the ambiguity of garden space makes it difficult to academically analyzethe characters of space in a discrete and objective way.The theory of Transparency, which has been influential on western modernismarchitecture, originated from the renowned American architectural theorist Colin Rowein1964and soon became proofed and developed thoroughly as an objective approach ofanalysis. It seeks generality in differences, which is universal in analyzing traditionalarchitecture and modern architecture. The characters of Traditional Chinese Gardencomprises of the ambiguity of formation and the experience of multidimensional spaces,which coincides with the basis of transparency.This essay traces the origins of the theory of transparency and researches on theprocess within which Colin Rowe introduced the cubism painting into modernismarchitecture, discovering that the concept of “shallow space” plays a key role in thistransform, providing basis for analyzing as an essential affiliated concept oftransparency. The Traditional Chinese Garden and the Chinese landscape paintingemerged simultaneously, and many theories of the two forms of art had great effects oneach other, which resembles the interaction between the cubism painting andmodernism architecture.Based on these facts, the analysis on transparency of Traditional Chinese Gardensshould be carried out by analyzing the potential characters of shallow space. This essayaims to build up the shallow space model of traditional gardens through seeking thepotential shallow space and analyzing its transparency. Six Traditional Gardens ofSuzhou have been visited and eight shallow spaces has been identified and catogerized.The author takes the garden theories of the renowned Chinese scholar YangHongxun as the major references, referring to the deep space and the shallow space asthe ‘scene’ and the ‘image’ respectively. This essay also generalizes the methods offorming shallow spaces in Traditional Chinese Gardens, discovering possibilities for theuncertain spaces to be reproduced and reconstructed. In the last part, these methods are put into practice in the project of Fenghe6Garden, a contemporary garden design. The shallow spaces in this garden are analyzedto accomplish the contemporary reconstruction of traditional garden space model.