Search Results (2)

Amidst rapid urbanization and modernization, numerous traditional villages in China face severe challenges, including landscape homogenization and the erosion of their distinctive characteristics. Addressing this issue requires a method capable of systematically identifying, analyzing, and reconstructing both the landscape and its underlying cultural features. This study proposes a digital analytical approach that integrates multimodal artificial intelligence with landscape language theory to address the homogenization of cultural landscapes in traditional Chinese villages. Taking Xinye Village in Zhejiang Province as a case study, the research systematically decodes its landscape spatial narratives and underlying cultural genes. This framework systematically deconstructs village landscapes across four levels: “vocabulary, context, grammar, and semantics”. The village image database is first automatically recognized and statistically analyzed by computer vision technology, which extracts 31 core landscape vocabulary items from three main categories and nine subcategories. Second, Retrieval-augmented Generation technology is employed to synthesize from the constructed domain-specific corpus, a natural context structured around Yuhua Mountain and Daofeng Mountain, as well as a cultural context based on ancestral hall order, connected through folk activities, and idealized by farming and reading passed down through generations. Building on this framework, a multimodal model was used to examine the spatial composition and combinatorial laws of landscape features. Six essential dimensions—spatial layout, visual order, element combination, functional relationships, circulation layout, and scale correlations—revealed the spatial grammar of shuikou landscape. Lastly, the semantic values conveyed by the landscape vocabulary were thoroughly analyzed across three dimensions—form, function, and culture—by integrating a knowledge base. This work creates a landscape language atlas of Xinye Village by combining these studies and using a linguistic model of “character-word-sentence-paragraph”. By methodically deciphering the clan’s cultural code of “farming and reading passed down through generations”, this clearly reconstructs the spatial narrative logic from micro-elements to macro-patterns. This research not only advances the study of landscape language in traditional villages from qualitative description toward a systematic, digital, and interpretable paradigm but also provides an operational theoretical and methodological foundation for the in-depth interpretation, conservation, and transmission of traditional village cultural landscapes. Full article

In the modernization process since China’s reform and liberalization, urban and village space design is reflected in the characteristics of Western cultures. The idea of Western space design has a profound influence on China, but the piecemeal individuation of art design, the disorderly public art modeling and concept, not only interferes with the aesthetic sense of urban and village public space itself, but also seriously affected the landscape order of public space. In fact, Chinese traditional settlement landscape excels in abundant landscape design and spatial sequence. This paper, using the methods of literature discussion, field research and spatial analysis, takes the typical traditional landscape settlement “Xinye Village” (新葉村) in the south of the Yangtze River as an example, and explores its public landscape order as a whole, and finds its spatial structure based on the “Five Elements and Nine Divisions (五行九宮)” cultural schemata. In the process of development, it has experienced the competition of public space, thus forming a stable and sustainable spatial order form. The purpose is to explore the cultural schema of the public landscape from the traditional Chinese settlement, and to put forward the possibility of “constructing the public landscape order based on culture” in future urban and village landscape design. Full article