Cultural significance and understanding of architecture

People in diverse cultures often have been facing similar issues of architecture and urban design, but the approaches they have taken to these issues may have been different in their significances and understanding of architecture.

Pierre Ryckmans The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past gives a great insight into the Chinese cultural thinking on architecture in their cities. below is a summary of his paper.

-          Neglect indifference to material past

-          Spiritual preservation and material destruction

-          Monumental absence of the past

-          Seems to inhabit the people rather than the bricks and stones. Spiritually active and physically invisible

-          Destruction of material heritage – characterized Chinese history.

-          European attitude – aggressive challenge to overcome erosion of time – to postpone ineluctable defeat.

-          Chinese architecture made of fragile and perishable materials – requires constant rebuilding due to decay

-          Transient nature of construction is an offering to voracity of time – eternity should inhabit the builder not the building

-          China neglected to maintain and preserve the ‘material’ expressions of the culture. However, Antiquarianism (limited in time and scope) developed in late China it was in search for spiritual and moral comfort and remained in relation to the written word.

-          No access to imperial collections and the repetitive looting and burning of huge concentrations of art treasures lad to great losses of Chinas heritage

-          However, this could be reason to the inexhaustible creativity displayed by the Chinese culture, and due to not getting crushed under the weight of treasures; the culture did not get clogged up. Like individuals, civilizations need a certain amount of creative forgetfulness.

-          An infallible memory means that no imaginative or thinking process can take place anymore – for to think is to discard

-          Confucius considered antiquity the repository of human values. Sage’s mission was not to create anything new but to transmit the heritage of the Ancients.

-          Only one form of immortality. Immortality was not to be found in super nature, in artefacts, as man only survives in man – which means in the memory of posterity, through the medium of the written word.

-          Chinese everlastingness does not inhabit monuments, but people. Permanence does not negate change, it informs change. Continuity is not ensured by the mobility of inanimate objects, it is achieved through the fluidity of the successive generations.

-          The vital strength, the creativity, the seemingly unlimited capacity for metamorphosis and adaptation of Chinese tradition may well derive from the fact that this tradition never let itself be trapped into set forms, static objects and things, where it would have run the risk of paralysis and death.

-          Manipulation through words – Its permanence is first and foremost of Permanence of Names, covering the endlessly changing and fluid nature of its actual contents.

-          China scrutinized its past as recorded in words, and caused it to function in the life of its present.

-          ‘Chinese civilization did not lodge its history in buildings’. Chinese civilization did not regard its history as violated or abused when the historic monuments collapsed or burned, as long as those could be replaced or restored, and their functions regained. 

-          ‘the only truly enduring embodiments of the eternal human moments are the literally ones.’