An Overall Representation Of Cultural Personality

As one of the architectural decoration, the Ornamentation of traditional living houses not only has a certain utilitarian function of the building structure, but also from which people can feel the aesthetic pleasure and emotional power. As a cultural symbol, the residential ornamentation conveys the living condition and spiritual desire of human under a specific historical and cultural background. It is a traditional heritage as well as the thinking of life; it is the portrayal of living conditions as well as natural environment. The traditional residential ornamentation is the embodiment of a series of ideological characteristics like the folk beliefs, fengshui philosophy, traditional social system and regulations, pray thinking, ideal expression, decorative role and so on. Based on plenty of field investigations and collection of images, this thesis will study on the ornamentation of traditional living houses in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces with a view to analyze the culture personality embodies in it, so as to research and interpret the cultural and spiritual connotations of the ornamentations in depth.There are five chapters in this dissertation. Firstly, in the part of introduction, after an intensive demonstration of the definitions of the traditional residential ornamentation, there is a summary of current research situation and research purpose. The second chapter will discuss about the personification of the structure of traditional living houses and the corresponding decorations. The third chapter will try to analyze and deconstruct the ornamentation form, with its internal form of personified cultural symbol and the external form of human emotion. In the forth chapter, there will be three sections discussed from the inheriting of tradition cultural, the representing of folk cultural and designing of daily life on the aspect of culture. In the last chapter, we will back to the modern time from the tradition, and discuss on the enlightenment of the designing of modern architecture which brought from the traditional residential decoration.