A Text About Life

Since 19^th Century,a number of western countries have started their macro urban practice based on the ideology of rationalism.The practice was generally symbolized by an artificial rational planning and aimed to provide a glossy life for people.However,due to the unawareness of citizen's everyday life,it resulted in the disappearance of the diversity and richness of their daily life,as well as the decrease of community vitality.They all proved unsuccessful of the experiment on the planning of rationalist cities.Deviated from everyday life,this sort of practice has been criticized in western world since 1960s,but it still continues in China today in a large scale.The exploitation of real estate,which economic factor dominates,has been generating the zero-degree space as Henri Lefebvre said.This kind of space ruins the original structure of cities,which makes them more and more devitalized.Faced with such fragmentized cities,those urban villages which are widely criticized but still lively interest me a lot.According to my investigation,I notice that although urban village is a phenomenon of the city in a special circumstance,it has similar status with traditional Chinese city and village.The status reveals a completely different notion from the bird's eye way of urban macro planning.It emphasizes all citizens'participation and encourages their every tiny effort in the construction of their surroundings,which is able to gradually form a city with difference and richness.The ability of keeping self-renewal of the city was called tissu city by Chinese architect Wang Shu.It is obvious that traditional method in urban research,which tends to research and describe the city in time series and social structure,can hardly grasp the changeable space and the construction logic of scattered everyday life.In that case,is it possible to recognize the largely emerging vitality in tissu city?If it is,what research method should be used to recognize it?In order to solve the puzzle,I try to take urban cities in Hangzhou as a specific research object.Through the analysis of the philosophical concepts of everyday life by Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl,Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau,I try to gain an understanding of the philosophical concepts of everyday life.Meanwhile,the paper sorts out and analyzes the urban discussion about everyday life in the field of architecture,and tries to obtain new research methods and perspectives.Among them,Alexander's A Pattern Language is unique because it focuses on the everyday life of the city and presents temporal changes in subtle elements.I try to make a key analysis of the book and restate the phenomenon observed by myself in urban villages in Hangzhou by using the pattern language as a theoretical tool,hoping to provide a new perspective for the interpretation of urban vitality and urban renewal.At the same time,the author realizes that there are still problems in the practice of architectural pattern language.Therefore,the author compares the practice cases of other architects with urban villages.