Urban and Rural Architecture and Natural Environment

The construction of urban and rural architecture with Chinese characteristics must be combined with China's natural environment. Due to the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau, the vast area of northwest China is affected by continental air masses, the climate is extremely arid, forming a harsh inland climate. In the southeast, under the influence of oceanic air masses, the climate is warm and humid, with abundant rainfall, which makes it prone to flooding. Between the above two regions, there is a wide gradient transition zone, which includes the Loess Plateau, the Hengduan Mountains and the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, where natural disasters are frequent.

The urban and rural buildings are affected by the natural environment, technical conditions and political and economic factors, of which the natural environment plays a fundamental role, especially in the village and township buildings of large volume and width is even more so. In the Qinghai-Tibet alpine zone and the northwest arid zone, is a bad building climate area, there are special wind and sand, permafrost and salty land base, should mainly advocate to maintain good living conditions, reduce energy consumption and can make full use of local building materials of raw soil construction and cover the soil building. In the transition area, there are large-scale landslides, mudslides, soil erosion and earthquake development areas, and there are special wet loess, swelling soil and red clay foundations; the selection of building sites should be strengthened, and the buildings should be built on stable lots, and more varied building methods should be adopted due to the terrain; traditional kiln buildings can be fully utilized in the Loess Plateau. In the eastern plains and coastal areas, is a sedimentary and flood zone, there are a variety of sedimentary soil and saturated soft soil foundations, densely populated, should be advocated to save land, to prevent subsidence, flood resistant multi-storey or even high-rise building methods. When the soil is soft, various foundation treatment techniques can be adopted to meet the needs of the superstructure, so as to achieve the purpose of building multi-story or even high-rise buildings.

The above understanding and opinions on the relationship between China's natural environment and urban and rural buildings are in line with the viewpoint that urban and rural buildings, as artificial environments, are in harmony with the natural environment and the diversified architectural styles generated by changes with the natural environment. This is an objective law. As long as we fully understand nature and utilize it to make urban and rural buildings harmonious with the natural environment, diversified groups of inexpensive and beautiful buildings will emerge. In order to meet the material and spiritual needs of people in different cultural backgrounds at multiple levels for various building types, the comprehensive social, economic and environmental benefits are self-evident.

(This article was originally published in: China's Quaternary North-South Comparison and Global Changes, A Compilation of Abstracts of Papers from the Sixth National Quaternary Symposium, Guangzhou: Guangdong Higher Education Publishing House, October 1993, pp. 222-223)