A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture

Past, Present, Future

David Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317505662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Design e architettura

A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future examines the impact of Chinese philosophy on China's historic structures, as well as on modern Chinese urban aesthetics and architectural forms. For architecture in China moving forward, author David Wang posits a theory, the New Virtualism, which links current trends in computational design with long-standing Chinese philosophical themes. The book also assesses twentieth-century Chinese architecture through the lenses of positivism, consciousness (phenomenology), and linguistics (structuralism and poststructuralism). Illustrated with over 70 black-and-white images, this book establishes philosophical baselines for assessing architectural developments in China, past, present and future.

PART I
Past

1
ARCHITECTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN THE CHINESE CORRELATIVE VIEW

The painting shown here is titled Wang Xizhi Watching Geese (Figure 1.1). It is by the Yuan dynasty painter Qian Xuan (1235–1305 CE).

FIGURE 1.1 Wang Xizhi Watching Geese, Qian Xuan (1235–1305 CE).

The subject of the painting, Wang Xizhi, lived almost a thousand years earlier (303–61 CE). He was one of China’s greatest calligraphers. It is said that he loved watching geese because their graceful manner inspired his brushstrokes. Wang Xizhi is famously associated with a collection of poems titled From the Orchid Pavilion. So Qian Xuan’s painting depicts the calligrapher as he engages in his favorite pastime. One of the poems of the Orchid Pavilion collection is as follows:

Looking up: blue sky’s end.
Looking down: green water’s brim.
Deep solitude: rimless view.
Before the eyes, a Pattern displays itself.
Immense, transformation!
A million differences, none out of tune.
Pipings all variegated:
What fits me, nothing strange.¹

Calligraphy, art, watching geese, deep solitude. Immense transformations. In fact, a million differences, none of which are out of tune. And almost as an aside: an open-air pavilion, in which one stands just to look beyond it … to a “rimless view.” Chinese architecture began as a collection of things among which were buildings. This is most evident in Chinese landscape painting. Humans and buildings are typically small in comparison to the larger natural setting. This particular painting is a scroll, which itself assists in conveying the endless quality of experiences as “rimless.” Chinese painters felt no obligation to fill their paintings with perspectival detail. Here, the emptiness in much of the right portion of the painting is water, an impression created by a few squiggles rippling around the geese, and a distant shore. But beyond that, where waters end and sky begins is negotiable; there is no horizon line to demarcate the difference. Cartesian coordinates affixing things to locations are not needed because horizon and sky exist as part of the participation of the viewer in the world of the painting. It would be like our own experience in such a setting: we would not need to say “there is the horizon” prior to an awareness of its presence. The lack of propositional definition in Chinese landscape painting encourages a phenomenology of presence. Freedom from perspectival constraints embrace the viewer into Wang Xizhi’s rimless world.

Now contrast Qian Xuan’s painting with this woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.2 Nude and Artist (1525), by Albrecht Dürer.

The mission of the artist at right is clear: to accurately represent the subject at left. A grid has been set up to aid his task, and by this device the artist is already separated from his subject. Far from “a million differences, none out of tune,” here a precise set of coordinates determine whether or not the artist’s representation (note: re-presentation) is “correct.” If he does not follow the coordinates, the artist falls short of his mission. His counterpart, Wang, is leisurely taking in “pipings all variegated … nothing strange.” But this artist is on edge, as if walking a tightrope; he must pay keen attention so as to capture every detail via the grid. We also know our place: we are spectators of the artist’s efforts. Perhaps we root for him to get it right. Or perhaps we think we can do better—which would mean kindly asking him to step aside, since getting it right requires sitting in his exact location and nowhere else. We are therefore not “in” this world; we are just looking in.

I suggest two heuristic diagrams (Figures 1.3a and b).

FIGURES 1.3a AND b Two heuristic Eye/I diagrams.

The key difference between 1.3a and 1.3b is the location of the Eye/I. By this nomenclature I mean both an individual consciousness (an I; or a you) as well as the general disposition of how a culture as a whole—the culture that is a composite of all of the individual consciousness that comprise it—sees things; this corporate cultural seeing is denoted by the Eye. Hence, the Eye/I. Seeing what things? Seeing all things in the cosmos; in fact how the cosmos itself is seen. In 1.3a, the Eye/I is coterminous within the workings of the cosmos, and its unreflective posture is to experience all things from this immersed position. Wang Xizhi’s enjoyment of “pipings all variegated/what fits me, nothing strange” is an appreciation not uttered by someone standing apart from the million transformations, which he only subsequently judges as “none strange.” No; Wang XiZhi’s enjoyment comes from his own participation in these organic transformations; he is merely part of the larger spontaneous unfolding.

Here is how the twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Fung Yulan describes this state of affairs:

Whether the table that I see before me is real or illusory, and whether it is only an idea in my mind or is occupying objective space, was never seriously considered by Chinese philosophers … since epistemological problems arise only when a demarcation between the subject and the object is emphasized. And in the aesthetic continuum, there is no such demarcation. In it the knower and the known is one whole.²

The Jewish theologian-philosopher Martin Buber (author of the essay “I-Thou”) describes this same state of affairs as follows: “The order of nature is not broken, its perceptible limits merely extend; the abundant flow of the life force is nowhere arrested, and all that lives bears the seed of the spirit.”³ More recently, Sebastien Billioud and Joel Thoraval term this way of being continuism: “A consequence of this worldview is that there is not separation between sociopolitical and cosmic spheres.”⁴ Billioud and Thoraval’s recent fieldwork demonstrates that there is still significant interest in China at all demographic levels for this outlook in daily life. In architectural terms, the Beijing-based architect Ma Yansong, one of the more philosophically grounded Chinese practitioners today, expresses this sensibility in propounding his theory of Shanshui (mountain-water) City: “The fundamental principle of ancient Chinese architecture is the maintenance of the order that governs heaven and earth, and all existence. From the onset, architecture and environment were considered as a single entity.”⁵

Fung’s and Buber’s, Billioud and Thoraval’s, and Ma’s observations all resonate with a term of the sinologist A.C. Graham’s that I will repeatedly use in this book: correlative. Figure 1.3a diagrams the correlative worldview of the Chinese outlook. Here is how Graham describes this outlook:

a cosmos of the old kind [i.e. of the Chinese kind] has also an advantage to which post-Galilean science makes no claim; those who live in it know not only what is but what should be. In correlating one is not yet detached from the spontaneous comparing and connecting which precedes analysis, in which expecting the same as before one is already responding in favor of it or against; in anticipating what will happen one knows how to act.⁶

This “knowing how to act” is not deductive reasoning; it derives more from a sense of how one’s being is organically linked to all other percolations in the rimless correlative cosmos. The Eye/I is immersed in it, and cultivating this unity is why, for instance, Daoism values taking “no action” (wu2 wei2),⁷ but also why Confucius himself held that by the time he was seventy, he could “follow my heart’s desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety”⁸ —the point being that all his actions would organically emit out of what nature would do anyway. All of this places a premium on a subjective sense of being at one with the workings of the cosmos.

Graham contrasts the correlative view with the outlook diagrammed in Figure 1.3b:

The objectivized world of modern science dissolves this primitive synthesis of fact and value, and in facilitating successful prediction leaves us to find our values elsewhere. Many are unhappy to be thus exiled from the sources of value; Westerners today who toss coins to read the hexagrams seem actually to feel more at home in the traditional cosmos of China.”⁹

In Figure 1.3b, while the Eye/I and cosmos are still in close relationship, they are no longer in union, and this separation is denoted by the dotted line. Even the cursory reader will see the similarity to the gridded partition between Dürer’s artist and his subject in Figure 1.2. Once cosmos and Eye/I are separated, the unreflective way of seeing begins to strive for certainties obtainable by precise definitions. Everything has a place in this kind of cosmos, and what space is occupied by one construct, by the logic of the case, cannot be occupied by something else.

Both models leave us with questions. The irony of Figure 1.3b is that, in striving for certainties, the Eye/I itself is location-less with respect to the cosmos. To put it more pointedly, if the cosmos is over there, why is the Eye/I over here? And where is here? This is one way to appreciate the angst of the current state of philosophy in the Greco-European line of ideas. While the Eye/I wants to be certain about everything, its very position renders it difficult for it to be certain about itself. Similarly, in Figure 1.3a, if the Eye/I is indeed coterminous with the cosmos, why expend centuries of philosophy formulating social protocols to achieve this oneness (Confucianism), or eradicating propositions to achieve this nameless oneness (Daoism), or insisting that a moment of enlightenment is needed to attain to this oneness (Chan Buddhism)?

In light of these problems, it is not my aim to promote one or the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Past
• Part II Present
• Part III Future
• Appendix: Chinese Technical Terms
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index