A Research On Public Space Of Monastery Garden Around The West Lake

Chinese monastery gardens mainly consist of Buddhist temple, Taoist temple and Jongmyo ancestral hall of the memorial. In addition to the functionality of religion, Buddhist temple and Taoist temple have stronger tourism function. The West Lake monastery gardens in Hangzhou originated in Jin dynasty, which have been honored as "the Buddhist country in southeast" for their outstanding artistic achievements on the location, landscaping, route designing, and plants configuration, especially abundant landscape elements as well as space capability adapted tourists of different stratum. They have always offering spaces for rest and entertainment to the public as gardens in the form.In this thesis, we dug out the special artistic features and humanism of the West Lake monastery gardens through exploring their formation history and the culture carried. We elaborate and profile them from its handling of the relationship between landscape preference and the public space or religion, so as to provide preference for modern landscape architecture. The process and results are as follows.First of all, by exploring the origin of the West Lake monastery gardens and their culture features as well as the doctrine characteristics of Buddhist and Taoist, we see the inevitability in their publicity. The doctrine characteristics that all beings are equal of Buddhist, the necessity to preach demands to shape the actual "paradise world", and the special landscape of lakes and hills and cultural atmosphere of the West lake make the monastery gardens surrounding the lake diverse and inclusive, and also make it the most widely accepted by the public as a recreation space.Secondly, the thesis is arranged by the formation of leading space, function and construction of the West Lake monastery gardens. By analyzing and comparing some of the typical West Lake monastery gardens, such as Yellow Dragon Cave, Temple of Soul’s Retreat, Bamboo-lined path at Yunqi, Hupao temple, Baopu Taoist temple, the old Yuhuang palace,Ziyun Cave and so on. The monastery gardens’forms of organizing their leading space, methods of designing the water and plants were probed, especially the special landscape construction features and quotable ways to build public garden space besides religious activities.Next,this paper pushed the analysis further on the affiliated gardens of different monastery. Firstly, comparing the public traveling and sightseeing features of the monastery gardens souring the West Lake with the Mosques and Churches in the downtown area in Hangzhou, we noticed that monastery gardens are always provided with more beautiful public spaces for sightseeing and amusement.Comparing with Japanses monastery gardens, we noticed that, affected by the Pure Land and Zen gardens, Japanese gardens show a preference to a small and quite environment, which make them not that public as gardens, but more suitable for a particular groupIn the end, the characteristics and shaping methods of public environment of the West Lake monastery gardens are concluded,simultaneously, guidance on the design of modern public landscape is proposed. The explore into the public space environment of monastery gardens involves a lot branches of learning which have something to do with the tourists, such as Environmental Ethics Environmental psychology and Behavior Science. We hope that this thesis could help to design the travelling spaces with more humanism and comfort.