Think About The Genius Loci Of The Medieval Gothic Church

In the context of globalization, rapid modernization and urbanization lead to significant socialdevelopment, and thus a series of problems came into being, among which the problem ofrelationship between city and architecture stands out prominently. Not only the Urban Disease occurres in succession, but modernity itself implies features of homogeneity, standardization anduniformity, which makes our cities and architectures lack of cultural significance. What’s more, alarge numbers of modernized cities with same appearance and similar architectures reduce culturalatmosphere of cities. At the same time, there are less people who share sense of identity andbelonging with regard to these architectures. As a result, the Genius Loci, which is supposed toembody the meaning of human existence, has totally disappeared. Then, how to reconstruct theGenius Loci of modern city and architecture? Our human, as historical beings, should naturally learnfrom history in order to get more inspiration.Looking back to the western architectural history, the author proposed that Gothic church isa kind of typical architecture which can be studied the architectural meaning. It loaded full ofreligious culture of that era, constructed the western lifestyle towards God in medieval age, implyingthe Genius Loci of existential meaning during that time. However, this paper is not intended toglorify western religious culture, nor to advocate a backward step, but is to criticize the darkreligious culture in medieval age, and to further analyze the historical rationality of materialproduction, engineering construction and lifestyle during that age. Therefore, the study on GeniusLoci of Gothic Church not only has important historical value, but has an importantenlightenment to explore the meaning of contemporary architectures.This paper, which applies C. Norberg Schu’s Genius Theory as well as its method to analyzearchitectural phenomena, combines the history and discussion together, and forms the researchframework which focuses on two periods of history, two original discussions and the significant enlightenment. In details, two periods of history refer to the medieval cultural history and the styleevolution history of Christian Church,which is the historical origins of historical cultural background of Gothic Church andarchitectural styles, constituting the content of Chapter2(Medieval Cultural Renaissance andUrban Development) and Chapter3(The Evolution of Christianity and its Church Style). Moreover,two discussions of this paper generally explain the following two points: firstly, analyzed from thestructural and technological innovation of Gothic Church, this paper discussed the openness andintroversion of architectural space, and spatial experience and its Genius Loci, which forms Chapter4(Spatiality and Genius Loci of Gothic church).Secondly, taking the musical activities occurred in Gothic Church as the object, this paperanalyzes the generation of polyphony music and its existential time experience, which is intertwinedwith spatial experience and constructs the Genius Loci of Gothic church, making up the fifth Chapter(Timeliness and Genius Loci of Gothic Church music). Lastly, the significant enlightenment ofthis paper is analyzed in Chapter6(Contemporary Enlightenment of Genius Loci in Gothic Church).This chapter, based on the analysis of the causes of meaningless modern cities and architectures,applies the results of studies on Genius Loci of Gothic Church in previous chapters so as to explorethe important role it plays in helping modern cities and architectures returning back to our life worldand obtaining existential significance.