Behavior Setting: Towards Comprehension And Concretization Of Spirit Of Place In Contemporary Context

"Genius loci", as "spirit of place", refers to the "character" through which aspecific built environment describes itself in order to "be-in-world". The theory of spiritof place, proposed by Christian Norberg-Schulz, a Norwegian scholar in the field ofurban architecture, in70s, and based on historical researches, discusses how urbanspace concretizes human "dwelling".The contemporary urban space and architecture, more and more diversified,globalized and complicated, from which "meaning" has been being moved, show a signof "de-spiritualization". Therefore, it is practically significant to develop the useful anddiscard the useless of such theory and to recall its proposal that "architecture has topossess spiritual content". However, the theory of spirit of place, based on thepre-modern civilization and phenomenology-oriented, is disaffiliated from the everydaylife-world and still limited in professional practice. Moreover, any design methodaiming at "spirit of place" has not been brought into being, and the "meaning" of builtenvironment has been confined to literal statement. Due to the theoretical and practicalfactors above, the dissertation discusses "spirit of place" through analysis of severalphenomena in present cities and architectural practices, based on the summaries andanalysis of existing theories, with comparative methods and exemplification, and then,by interdisciplinary researches and architectural experiments, provides a way to changethe designing attitude and to optimize designing methods.The formal part of the dissertation is divided into three parts, which are"context-comprehension-concretization". The analysis of contemporary context of"spirit of place" begins with discourses of the contradiction between existing theoriesand contemporary realities, approaching to present "dwelling" and human-placerelations, international style and globalization, loss and reconquest of place, man-madeplace and virtual society, the "non-imageable" phenomena in contemporary urbanenvironments. According to the discourses, the dissertation summarizes the dilemma inrealities of the theory of spirit of place, and indicates that the problem of spirit of placeshould be understood in specific "context", and that the concept should shift from thepre-modern context to a contemporary one, as the reflective modernity. On account ofthe diversification and complexity of the contemporary context, the dissertation attempts to establish an open theoretical system of "spirit of place", as a result of whichthe concept may relate itself to more categories of architecture. In this framework, thedissertation introduces the theory of "behavior setting" by Roger G. Barker, andrepresents spirit of place with an ecological psychology-orientation and discusses theembodiment of "character" of built environments in contemporary context, regarding"synomorph" as "character","behavior setting" as "place". The part of comprehensionstudies multiple cases that reveal the "life-world" in response of the phenomenaproposed by the former part. At last, inspired by "behavior setting", the dissertationproposes the operating circuits of performance of "characters" in designing and a wayof thinking in principles of "behavior setting".