The Analysis And Regeneration Of Site Spirit In Jiangnan Ancient Water Towns

As one regional feature of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, the Jiangnan ancient water towns contain a plenty of precious historical and cultural value which the current modern buildings can never match. This kind of value also plays a certain role in guiding and promoting our modern architectural design , therefore, we need to inherit this specific historical context. As one particular site, Jiangnan ancient town can not only provide people with an aesthetical feeling in form and meet people's needs in function , but also it can give us a spiritual experience. However, in the current project constructions attempting to inherit the context of ancient towns, on the one hand we saw some increasingly prominent problems like functional loss and authenticity loss in the booming town tourism practices, on the other hand , it was a pity for us to notice some exiting problems like excessive imitation of traditional forms of ancient towns and lack of situation of Jiangnan area. It was those exiting problems that cause the loss of site spirit of Jiangnan ancinet towns to some extent, people can hardly get a spiritual experience in those places .Trying to start from the essence of site and site spirit and making a horizontal and vertical research on the conception of site spirit , this paper made a deep analysis of the spiritual content of ancient town sites with a purpose of mainly discussing two aspects, First is how to protect and retain the site spirit of those original ancient water towns , Second is how to effectively inherit and regenerate the site spirit of Jiangnan ancient towns in our modern design , which is the focus of this article.This paper consists of four different parts:The first and second chapters are the related definition and theoretical analysis of Jiangnan ancient water towns and site spirit. The first chapter mainly analyzed the concept and current status of Jiangnan ancient water towns , making clear the object and content of research. Meanwhile , in the part of analysis of current status, it also focused on discussing the problems exiting in Jiangnan ancient water towns and our modern design with the symbols and images of those ancient towns. It was those exiting problems that require us to make a research on the site spirit of Jiangnan ancient towns. While, in the second chaper , the conception and relating theory of site sprit has been detailed elaborated. This third chapter is about an analysis of factors influencing the site spirit of those ancient towns such as"the factor of nature","the factor of artificial environmental place and behavior"and"the factor of culture". On the basis of grasping those three factors, this paper extracted the common characteristics between those factors and finally summarize the overall atmosphere of site sprit of Jiangnan ancient water towns. The forth and fifth chapters are the discussion about some strategies of how to protect and regenerate the site spirit of ancient towns. The forth chapter is about the discussion of strategies of how to protect and retain the site spirit in those historical water towns, while the fifth chapter is about some strategies of how to inherit and regenerate the site spirit of ancient towns in some new built blocks surrounding that, which is the focus of this article.