Preliminary Discussions On The Poetry-realm Planning And Designing Thoughts

Contemporary urban planning and designing is facing problems of human environmental crisis, humanistic predicament and discontinuity of Chinese cultural-spiritual inheritance. In order to find a solution, we propose the poetry-realm planning and designing (PRPD) as awakened by the Chinese culture of"Kingdom of Poem", inspired by the modern western philosophical "Poetic Dwelling"and hinted by"Shan-shui City"theory,"Architecture Imago"theory and humanistic aesthetics.The noble-romantic temperament and poetry traditions have nourished Chinese national aesthetical soul for thousands of years; among these traditions,'poetry realm (PR)'is a touching wisdom. PR is a sort of mind realm (MR), expressed in concise and beautiful poems containing full meaningful charms. MR is a kind of spiritual-imagery realm that can only be implicitly understood but is difficult to be expressed by explicit words. Originated from poetry and then spread out to various arts fields, the formation of MR theory shows that it is a special projection from Chinese traditional imagery thinking when facing environmental aesthetic aspects. By contrast, PR implies a whole system, interwoven by artistic conceptions of "words, imagery and consciousness" with MR as its connotation. From the view of "Words-Mind Debate" of the traditional philosophy and "Linguistic Turn" of modern western philosophies, it represents an expression to surpass literature and rhetoric to convey a true significance of existing and seek an essence of planning and designing. PR is a vivid reflection of the nature-human harmony (NHH) of a natural philosophy, expressing the aesthetic-transcendent consciousness from emotional sublimation and the aesthetic, Tao-awaken psychology of "self-examination and honesty" that shows the individual creativity in mutual dependencies of reasons and emotions. Therefore, PR embodies the aesthetic meanings of natural, emotional and creative beauties.The traditional Chinese architectures have ample expressions of PR: the architecture-poetry theory is a unique tradition, through which rich contents, such as construction principles, artistic and emotion realms, are embodied; building groups interact with poetic rhythms but when they are in plain and mountain regions, they show regulated verses of poems and"ci""qu"(a kind of Chinese traditional poem); the architectural image is achieved through the ingenious technical rationality by infusing aesthetic idea. Chinese garden is the embodiment of PR with NHH inside: Chinese garden is the artistic scope of poetic emotion and picturesque sights;Since Wei and Jin dynasties, PR has gradually become a universal, self-disciplined principle for garden-construction arts as gardens were developed;The gardens have various poetic tastes: the literati gardens are elegant and distinctly spacious;royal gardens are vast and supreme; temple gardens intend to show heaven-like grandness and vastly clear-cut celestial realms. Traditional Chinese settlements and towns contain elegant PR living wisdoms: the poetic culture fosters glamorously livable and inviting garden homeland; fengshui (geomantic omen) formulates HHH as its core, displaying a picturesque appearance; settlements and towns are interblended with hills and waters showing the rhymes of poetry; the cultural accumulation and poetic interpretation make cities to be loaded with poetic temperament and traditional"eight-scene"culture of towns poeticizes living environments.Through the periods of ancient Greece to the Enlightenment Movement, most of the classical urban-planning ideas in the western were under the complicated interweaving between rationalism and humanism, and only in the Middle Ages, there appeared some trends to naturalism under the suppression of theocracy. In the modern and contemporary times, there are humanism-oriented factions (the Garden City, etc.) as well as rational-oriented factions (Modernism-Planning thoughts, etc.). The rationalism has been considered to have ever so dominated that it even greatly suppressed humanism; this shortcoming was expected to be mitigated by promoting humanism. However, in the western culture, the rationalism as"Rationality dominates nature"and the humanism as"Human conquers nature"are respectively consistent within each of them. As a result, the rationalism appeared in the form of conquering nature from very beginning (Hippodamus mode in ancient Greek) and even targeted to reform and conquer nature in modern sciences so that it has been criticized as instrumental rationalism in modern society; similarly, since the famous philosophical saying, "Man is a measure to all things", appeared in ancient Greece, overvaluing the Human also showed arrogance towards the Nature,which produced potential shortcoming for later slipping to one-sided anthropocentrism. PR divides planning thoughts between eastern and western such that even the naturalism in the Medieval is not comparable with the traditional, self-conscious Chinese PR. The changes of the post-modernism, ecological-environmental value and their corresponding new exploration on theories and practices in the contemporary western planning thoughts show that the western planning thoughts are approaching PR to certain degree. Except the legend of the Garden of Eden, western gardens, from ancient west-Asia and ancient Egypt to the mature French classicism gardens, all followed the regularized thinking thread that the nature is subordinated to the rationality in the form of strengthening the artificial-arts expressions and, influenced by China, the English natural aesthetics was awaken to create natural-scene gardens and turned to the modern western gardens. The western modern gardens then took naturalization as an important guideline.Looking back upon the architectural space theory,"functional space→total space→gray space→field space→flowing space"generally shows a sort of progressive increase in spacial'poetic sense'. The"architecture conception", proposed by Liang Sicheng, introduces MR into the architectural space design while Chinese poetic MR has always been pursuing the extremely perfect beauties with meaningful philosophies and lively tastes such that there widely exist MR of touching lives in orchid trees or running-water with sunset, etc. Inspired by"architecture conception"with poetry MR, a theory of"poetry-realm space"(PRS) is proposed; it is a distinctive space that is melted with natural environments and possesses higher cultural quality after PR thoughts are infused with architectural entity spaces. It has four particular characteristics, namely, intelligent, layering, meaningful and civilizing. The construction of PR space is a cultural construction to surpass entity spaces and pursue idealization so as to reach the realm to appreciate beauty with conciseness, and it consists of three constructing principles: simulating and complying with nature; producing harmonic images, infusing arts of humanities and sublimating beauty tastes, as well as showing its distinctive characteristics and expressing the true creativeness. The concept of PRS is valuable in deepening understanding of the essence of architectural-space theory, expanding connotation of architectural culture and promoting cultivation of designers. Its designing procedure can be processed by repeating the cycle of"image taking→conception setting→entity expressing→form shaping→passion examining"with their interactions.Chinese modern urban construction has gained great achievements but there also exist some problems, such as deteriorating environments, disintegrating consistency of urban structures, ignoring regional characteristics and discontinuing historical cultural tradition. A modern planning should take NHH as the prerequisite criteria to advocate humane spirits and possess the specific Chinese cultural characteristics."Eco City"not only promotes harmony between human and nature and"Shanshui (mountains and waters) City"but also possesses Chinese culture spirits. Along this direction,"Poetry Realm City"(PRC) is further proposed. It refers to a garden-style city in high harmony with natural ecologies with profound humane connotation and lofty aesthetic levels. As a planning thought, it implies that, following the principle of ecological sciences, infiltrated and directed by PR and MR concepts, it pursues the urban planning thoughts aiming at building ideal living environments as a contemporary concrete practice that has distinctive Chinese cultural characteristics. PRC is characterized with six features: the true nature of human and heaven, the original attributes of spirits setting, the harmony between the interdependent passion and rationality, the connection of past and present, the continuity of keeping pace with the times and the quality of MR sublimation. Thus come five strategies for PRC planning, of which the first is the aesthetic strategy of mountains and waters, which means that the city is artistically merged with circumference nature based on the concept of big environments by adopting the six art techniques of planning: reserving hills and waters, leaning hills corresponding to waters, revealing hills and waters, siding hills by waters, displaying hills that are connected to waters, innovating hills and waters. The other strategies include ecological-scientific strategy, culcural-contextualism strategy, strategy of referencing to geomantic omen, and poetic cultivation.Since the reform and opening up, the residential construction has continuously been improving, but there also exist many problems, such as disrespect for natural landscape features, fossilization of environmental designs, overrunning of European architectural styles. The residential environment art should be mastered by the melody of returning to nature as well as comforting and warming, aiming at strengthening human passions and original attributes and making new technologies follow the ecological principles in serving people. Creating modern PR living with Chinese characteristics means making Chinese-style environments following the artistic concept of"magically creating nature", constructing natural form of"fountain, stone, pine tree and moon"under the man-made environments, in which people can experience PR of"the rain beating against the banana trees and crouching while listening to autumn raining"to nurture their bodies and spirits, enjoy heart-and-mind happiness and appreciating beauties when realizing Taoism. The key of the designing lies in organically making use of the natural features of basis, upholding natural ways with unique soul-oriented technique comparable with the Nature's work while taking strong ecological consciousness. After experiencing abusing of European styles in China, it represents the awakening, inheriting and new creating of the Chinese own construction culture as an exploration to pursue the ideal of the PR living in the current China despite the many on-going arguments over the"new Chinese-style"housing.While Chinese scenic spots have been prosperously developed and accumulated rich and valuable PR heritages, there are still many problems biased from the guiding ideology of planning and constructing, e.g., over-commercialization and over-urbanization, landscape being artificialized and becoming pleasure-ground-like, more developments than protections, etc., caused by those misunderstandings such as commercializing scenes, overwhelming tourism business, mixing scenic spots with amusement parks, and promoting development of scenery regions by following urban real estate development. It is necessary to criticize those harmful development behaviors such as pursuing quick success and profits, chaotic grabbing and occupying lands,"going for wool and coming home shorn","draining the pool to get all the fish". As scenery-appreciation PR in China has a long history and has long become the soul of scene spots whose PR with thousands of excellent poetic rhythms can dispel anxieties from people, we should take the PR conception as a core value in planning and constructing scenic spots and set up a planning system for scenic spots with distinctive Chinese characteristics. The planning and constructing for scenic spots should have two concepts,"obeying-nature protection"and"advocacy of MR sublimation", and comply with technological principles:'layout with divisive deployment','capacity controlling','artificial-facilities hiding, refining and naturalizing'and so on.In an overall viewing over the practice of planning-designing, it is discovered that the PR thinking plays a prominent role in stimulating creative energy, seeking harmony in passion realms, condensing soul-awakening and nurturing national cultural spirits. The PR ideal is a call to direct future trends of planning-designing. As human beings have their own traditional defects and natural sciences are unable to cover everything in the world, modern and future societies, which the religious Gods can no longer rule and lead, are inevitably to be threatened by residential environmental crisis and humanistic predicaments, when the PR culture may show its great advantages. It would be the supreme level of Chinese PR to build up the harmonious relationship between human and nature as well as human and human in the PR way and further extract the essence of the heaven and earth for expressing humanity, which would unify human desires, personality expressions with respect for the Nature to put the poetic mind and mood into spatial construction to have strong passions and aesthetic tastes from the very beginning, which then brings a promotion of cultural qualities and sublimation of aesthetic tastes. This is the PR planning and designing, that is, to build residential environments that can continuously nurture beautiful spirits and humanistic temperament based on the inheritance and development of Chinese culture with the help of the magic illusion in poetic MR.