The Evolution Of Chinese University Campus Morphology

The evolution of university campus morphology has always been tightly coupled with the structural morphology of the society that it is in. In the western developed countries, the evolution of the society and university campus morphology appears to be introverted. Different from the characteristic of gradual evolution in the developed countries, the trend in China manifests to be extroverted. The abrupt jumps at certain historical stages are a special characteristic for the evolution of university campus morphology in China, which is due to the fact that China was developed from the feudal society to the semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, then directly to the socialism society; and the founding and developing of the Chinese modern universities are under the influence of that special social evolutionary morphology. Therefore, the Chinese modern universities' evolutionary morphology is very complex and it varies from time to time, and from location to location. To adapt to a concrete social politic, economy, and cultural environment, it adjusts its own form and functionality accordingly, and reveals a unique merit in each historical stage.Embarking from the characteristics of different historical stages, exhaustive research has been horizontally carried out in this dissertation on the correspondence between a specific university campus morphology and the orientation of social value that bears it for each individual historical stage. Based on that, this dissertation makes use of the vertical development along the time as a master thread, and induces the continuous key promotion factors to be: the traditional cultural characteristic, the centralization control and the pursuing of university essence, which conclude the historical development and evolution of the Chinese university campus morphology from an integrity point of view.The entire dissertation is divided into three sections, where Section III is for comparison. Taking the time period as the main thread, Section I contains 2 sub Sections to illustrate the relationships between the orientation of social value and the Chinese university campus morphology that were born from it, for the time period from 1860 to 1949, right before the People's Republic of China was founded. Section II contains 4 sub Sections to elaborate those relationships for the time period after 1949. Finally, this dissertation compares the western university campus morphology with the Chinese morphology within different time period, both of which were formed under certain national social politics, cultures, and economic factors.