Zhongwei Wang

Traditional Lingnan gardens, one of the three major types of Chinese garden design, have evolved over nearly a millennium, embodying the distinctive craftsmanship and aesthetic sensibilities of the Lingnan region. The architectural elements of doors and windows in these gardens serve as key expressions of regional cultural identity. This study focuses on four renowned Lingnan gardens (e.g., Yuyin Garden in Guangzhou, Liang Garden in Foshan, Qinghui Garden in Shunde, and Ke Garden in Dongguan) as primary case studies to examine the typologies, decorative characteristics, and aesthetic qualities of their doors and windows. Based on aesthetic imagery, the research elucidates both the functional and structural principles governing these designs, while also exploring their aesthetic resonance with traditional Chinese arts, such as calligraphy, painting, and poetry. By deepening the theoretical understanding of the formal and artistic features of Lingnan garden doors and windows, this study contributes to advancing the scholarly discourse on traditional garden architecture and supports the ongoing cultural preservation of this important heritage.

A historic area situated within contemporary urban space must adapt to modern lifestyles and aesthetic sensibilities to sustain its vitality and facilitate effective heritage transmission. A key criterion for evaluating adaptation is its ability to fulfill people’s ‘demands’ for it. This paper focuses on people’s demands as its core, employing the post-occupancy evaluation theory and the scene theory to develop a subjective evaluation framework for scenes within urban historic conservation areas. An application case study uses the typical historical area of Foshan, China, as an evaluation framework. The discussion encompasses spatial vitality, extraction of scene elements, construction of an indicator set, satisfaction evaluation, and differences in evaluations across areas and individual indicators. The research findings reveal several key points: (1) People’s attention and demands regarding scene elements in urban historic conservation areas are multifaceted. (2) There is a high degree of tolerance among people towards urban historic conservation areas, with varying preferences for different areas. (3) The approach to area protection and development needs diversification. (4) People’s overall perception of an area is influenced by various elements within the scenes. The application of this evaluation framework can aid in understanding people’s “demands” and their underlying reasons while also providing assistance for future optimization efforts related to urban historic conservation areas. Furthermore, the subjective evaluation framework has potential applicability for research into other historical cultural street areas.

Traditional villages are a valuable for their historical and cultural heritage, and have long been the focus of academic research regarding their protection and renewal methods in the face of increasing urbanization. In the village renewal model, the continuation and regeneration of cultural context is the core issue. This paper aims to construct the updated narrative text of Shawan Ancient Town on the basis of narrative rules and methods, while also exploring how to generate the conservation and renewal strategies based on the narrative text. Drawing on the concepts and methods of narratology and based on the cultural background and current conditions of Shawan Ancient Town’s architectural heritage, this paper takes “narrative in terms of theme, clue, path, and material” as the basic framework to construct the narrative text in the context of traditional village renewal. Then four aspects, such as “base combing, interface integration, patch symbiosis, and debris collection”, are used to update the methods of the spatial situation of individual places. Additionally, multiple construction forms are explained, generating a historic, interesting, and experiential strategy for the protection and renewal of ancient towns. This study demonstrates logical thinking from the construction of narrative text to the generation of renewal strategies from a narrative perspective while deepening the typical research on the traditional village narrative renewal mode. It is advantageous to build a protection mechanism for historical and cultural villages, and explore a path to protect, inherit, and promote the cultural heritage of villages based on China’s current situation.

The form and overall style of rural settlements are the carrier of the rural regional context and aesthetics. At present, China’s rural areas are facing a disorderly style and urbanisation. This study is based on similarity aesthetic regularity and visual aesthetic regularity; on the one hand, this work researches the method of building interface coordination from the aspects of form, material and colour, and puts forward the interface construction method of strong contrast, medium contrast and weak contrast according to the rural areas. On the other hand, this study analyses people’s perception characteristics of the style from the visual psychological level, explains the skills for the rural interface and sequence arrangement based on the relationship between visual matching and the bottom of the picture and constructs the aesthetic image under the new overall relationship of the place. Finally, this study puts forward a series of strategies for rural style construction, such as symbol concatenation, contrast reconstruction and aesthetic conflict transformation, to constructing a new aesthetic image of place so as to provide ideas and methods for the development of the rural style in the future.

In the rural areas of China, construction is growing vigorously, and the question of how to realize the creative inheritance and development of these areas in the regional context, as well as the exploration of new construction methods and paths, are important problems. Nowadays, there are two developing trends in terms of research methods. Firstly, the boundaries between various disciplines are becoming increasingly blurred, and interdisciplinary theoretical reference has become an effective means of realizing innovation in this field. The other trend relates to the great development of digital technology, such as parameterization and spatial information technology. This technological innovation sheds new light on rural image construction. This study aims to draw on the montage art concept and organization techniques and to integrate the new technical language into the construction of new aesthetic orientations and context-related inheritance paths of rural historical places in China. Based on the aesthetic relevance of montage aesthetics to rural regional characteristics, the aesthetic cognition of the rural area in Guangdong is analyzed and demonstrated. Then, the strategies and methods used for the construction of rural area are established based on four layers, i.e., the narrative clues, base site pattern, spatial interfaces and monomer construction. The present research expands on the perspectives and methods of rural reconstruction, provides new ideas for the current rural practice, and is conducive to promoting the systematic study of rural construction theory.

Historical and cultural blocks contribute to urban cultural construction in a very significant way. Regardless of their specific types, historical and cultural blocks not only add brilliance to the cultural heritage of cities but also take on more urban responsibilities through actively expanding their use values. This perfectly embodies the diversified protection and development of traditional blocks. In discussing the diversified development achievements of a block, its users usually have the most since their behaviors are closely related and mutually interactive with block environments. In this sense, collecting user evaluations helps to identify the diversified development status of a block from the inside and explore more values. Considering that the residential-type historical and cultural blocks in Guangzhou have realized diversified development in terms of location values, function expansion, and user integration, this paper takes two typical blocks in the city for a case study and performs user evaluation analysis. Evaluation data are collected through traditional questionnaire surveys and text mining to expand the scale of access to information and enhance data flexibility. An evaluation index set is established for residential-type blocks by discussing the achievements of the diversified block developments and extracting the key factors of block environments based on data analysis. The research results of this paper provide a basic framework for the in-depth analysis of blocks and evaluation models building and offer suggestions of protection and design for other blocks.