Research On The Traditional Settlement Form Of The Li Nationality

This essay is making use of the theory of analyzing cities, from perspectives such as the climate, terrain, ecology balance, to redefine the Li tribe ’ s traditional habitat elements and the relationships in-between. The essay is also trying to find out, through a long historical time frame, how the tribe develops and evolves in a stable structure.The main research includes the formation of Li tribe’s traditional tribe structure and its characteristics, its internal structure and its evolution.This essay used the tribe’s building structure as a starting point, first by,understanding Li tribe’s culture characteristics, build up the background knowledge of its transformation. Later, case studies were done, through the study of a few existing typical tribe houses’ forms, to analyze the entire tribe’s current conditions. Then, through comparison of literatures and case studies of Li tribe, to summarize them into five core elements, which are boundaries,terrain, river, residential accommodation and levels of texture. Finally, through analyzing these five core elements, infers the five internal structures that governs the evolution of forms and transformation of Li tribe. They are: the enclosure, the ins and outs, the nesting, the gapping and the gradient. These five structural forms have covered most of the elements evolutions, and also includes the core and key elements.Li tribe’s building form’s evolution reflects on how these forms and structure evolves to suit and adjust to the external factor changes.