In the nearly 30 years since he decided to be a real Chinese-style architect, Lin Song has devoted a lot of efforts. This is his life career, and it can even be said to be his spiritual totem.
Lin Song, a National Class I Registered Architect and Senior Engineer, graduated from Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology, and later became a visiting professor at his alma mater. Lin Song does architectural design to the core. He really combines his personal life with the career he loves. In Lin Song's outlook on life, life must be full of blood, and it must be transformed into a lasting persistence. In Lin Song's design concept, architecture must be creative and retain its soul. Perhaps, in Lin Song's world, his perseverance and the soul of architecture all stem from his passion for Chinese culture.
Barefoot architect spirit
Lin Song, who practices Zen, believes that the inspiration for design is the search for the heart and the comprehension of the surrounding environment. Architecture is a fusion of rationality and irrationality. Inspiration needs to be stored. The more accumulated, the closer to the goal.
Lin Song likes to travel. He said, "Tourism is to steal someone's life experience in a specific time and space. As long as we experience it with our heart, the vitality will be internalized into our heart, and our life will be fuller." From the age of 20 to 22, Lin Song traveled almost three-quarters of China, experienced different cultures, and gained a deeper understanding of the construction industry.
Lin Song often said that it doesn't matter where you live, what matters is the character you shape in different geographical environments, making it closer to perfection. Lin Song was born in the north, and now his designs have spread across 28 provinces and municipalities across the country. Bringing a bag, getting into a sleeping bag and sleeping on the design plot, this is normal to Lin Song and his team. The reason why Lin Song maintains such a work habit is to allow his feet to truly feel the pulse of the land, so as to restore the authenticity of the land and the soul of the building.
Lin Song believes that architecture is first and foremost a perceptual art. The feeling of the land at the beginning of the design, the shaping of the place spirit in the design, and the perception of space after the completion are inseparable from the feeling of the soul. Therefore, there is nothing special about the architect. At the beginning of the design, he quietly talks with the land, and listen to and search for the place spirit contained in the land, that is, the soul of the land. Just like the ancients believed that every land has its own soul, commonly known as the "Land Lord". When the architect finds this soul, internalizes it in his heart, expresses it as a drawing in the language of architecture, completes it through construction, and returns it to the land. The building, with the same place spirit, influences and shapes the people who live in it, and the architect just completes this revival.
The building should be like a plant, as if it grew out of the specific environment. It is the materialization of life forms. This is the building in Lin Song's eyes. Therefore, what architects shape is a feeling, not an external form, but a continuation of the knowledge of culture and roots. In the past, there was a saying that a region’s soil and water cultivate its people. In fact, it also shapes the culture. Lin Song proposed a concept called "barefoot architect spirit ".
The word "barefoot" means "walk without shoes", which was first seen in Chinese folklore. For example, the "Barefoot Daxian" is a fairy in Taoist legends. He always wanders around and helps the people eradicate demons. Because of his unique barefoot costume, he has this name.
In the early days of the founding of New China, there were not enough doctors in rural areas, so a large number of doctors went to the countryside to treat the common people, who were called "barefoot doctors". They don't have white work clothes and often have muddy feet and are dressed in coarse clothes, but they have the purest and warmest heart to save lives and help the wounded. This "barefoot spirit" is very precious, rooted in the earth and watching over the countryside. In Lin Song's eyes, rooted in the earth is precisely the basic skill that architects should have. In this way, we will not create buildings that are contrary to the spirit of the land and place due to plagiarism and ignorance, and mislead the people living in them. In this regard, the responsibility of the architect is great, which almost the same as a doctor, but our architects lack this awareness.
Seek the roots of Chinese culture and restore the soul of the land with architecture
Culture is a strategy for people to deal with the environment, and through the edification of time, it forms a collective unconscious instinctive response when people communicate with each other. Architecture has absorbed this culture and passed it down from generation to generation in a solidified manner, like a heavy and objective history book.
Taking the ancient Huizhou residency with three carvings (brick carving, wood carving, and stone carving) as an example, Lin Song introduced to us that it is influenced by both the regional environment and Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism.
More mountains, more brigands. The outer walls of Huizhou buildings are naturally high, and the small windows on the walls are very similar to shooting holes in the city wall, reflecting people's introverted awareness of self-prevention. Because of the limited land, houses are naturally close to each other. For fire prevention, there is a fire wall for each household, which is gradually stacked along the roof slope. In order to achieve harmony with the environment, the ends of the stacked walls are raised up, meaning "five mountains facing the sky", and it is also called the horse head wall because it resembles a horse head. Because of the mountains, it is difficult to develop the economy, so people go out to make a living. Therefore, people at age of 13 or 14 will go out as an apprentice. Approaching 17 or 18, they go home to get married and give birth to children, and then went out again. Some people who makes a good living returns to their hometowns in their 60s, and most never return.
In this case, the life of Huizhou women is rather miserable.
Lin Song told us a story. Once there was a sister and the elder one married into a family that had few family members. Not long after she got married, her husband passed away early. The lady was unable to sleep every night, so she cut the string that string together a bunch of coins and threw them all over the floor. Then she took another string and groped in the dark to string the coins one by one. She strung them together until the morning, when she was so tired and could fall asleep. When the lady passed away, the little sister found a small wooden box when she was packing up her belongings. When she opened it, she found a string of money. When she touched them, the texture on the coins had been smoothed out.
In fact, this is only a microcosm of Huizhou women. Huizhou dwellings are mostly built by merchants returning to their hometowns in their later years. Often, they are approaching their old age, and their lives and dwellings have a sense of twilight and not cheerful, which are deeply influenced by Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism on the superiority and inferiority and courtesy. Reflecting on architecture is the pursuit of regulation and emphasizing several courtyards. On the other hand, in southern Anhui, the mountainous land makes the residency difficult to be as comfortable as that of Jiangsu and Zhejiang on the flat land. To maintain this regulation, it is necessary to compress the original courtyard space. The human scale is fixed, and the room size cannot be reduced, so the courtyard becomes the choice for compressing.
Therefore, the walls of Huizhou dwellings are high, but the courtyards are extremely small and deep. People living in it has a narrow view. In addition, the rule that requires women to "stay in the house" corresponds to the need to prevent women's unfaithfulness to her husband, which brings this feature to the extreme. Therefore, Huizhou also has the most chastity archways in the country.
In Lin Song's view, the charm of architecture lies in the vicissitudes of life.
After knowing the history and culture behind the building, it is easier to understand the Huizhou dwellings with blue bricks and black tiles. Huizhou architecture we have seen is not only an interpretation of the unique architecture form, but also has a deeper understanding of the culture and humanity behind it.
This kind of building that suppressed and restrained human nature and did not show cheerfulness, has created the unique gentleness and housekeeping ability of Huizhou women after the change of time and life from generation to generation.
In designing the Suzhou Garden Villa project, Lin Song and his team traveled all over Suzhou. Because the alley is too narrow, they can only ride bicycles, knock on the doors of local people and understand the urban changes. "At that time, when I walked into the alley, the ancient surrounding houses gives me a feeling as if the surrounding sound had disappeared and I had entered the ancient atmosphere." Lin Song still vividly remembers the scene at that time.
Based on the analysis and research on the urban pattern of the ancient city of Suzhou and the surrounding environment of the plot, Lin Song's team proposed the urban texture of "street-lane-alley" and the concept of "urban darning", establishing the residential entry and exit patterns based on the distance between ancient lanes. The east-west are "lanes", and the north-south are "alleys", reproducing the spatial texture of the ancient city of Suzhou. The two road and waterway streets, vertically and horizontally, forming a metaphor of double checkerboard pattern in Suzhou. In the park, the Beisi Tower is used as the end view to establish a connection. On the whole, it forms a spatial artistic conception of abundant greenery, open entrance, tower shadow sloping westward, crossing the alleys and entering the courtyard.
The building of the courtyard adopts a multi-entry courtyard residential layout, and the single-entry courtyard is supplemented by some gardening techniques to form several gardens of different sizes. Combining modern life forms and traditional spatial patterns, it shows the humanistic care and spiritual pursuit of communication and introspection. It is not simply putting a centralized building into the enclosure and calling the remaining open space a courtyard. It is like the layout of painting and calligraphy. "Painting white as black" makes the "black" of the interior space and the "white" of the external garden sets off each other, complements each other, borrows scenery from each other, and integrates with each other. Through a series of spatial techniques of traditional gardens, a variety of spatial atmospheres of different sounds, colors and scales are created. The artistic conception of deep courtyard provides a place for people to communicate with nature.
Based on the texture of the ancient city of Suzhou, Lin Song’s team created a precedent for courtyard-style spaces. The project has also won the National Chinese Architecture Design Award and has been widely praised and imitated by the industry.
In Lin Song's eyes, architecture should be rooted in a specific regional culture and national culture like a plant, blend with the texture of the city, and reflect historical changes. As Lin Song said, doing architecture in China must have a Chinese feel and atmosphere.
Therefore, if you want to use architecture to restore the "soul" of the land, you must first find the "root" rooted in Chinese culture.
Construct the Architectural System Theory with the Root of Oriental Thought and Culture
China has a vast territory, and different regions nurture different customs, and finally gather together to form a long and diverse traditional Chinese culture. However, in this era of traditional culture breakage, Chinese architecture has always followed the path of the West, so every time he goes abroad to investigate, it makes his heart tingle.
Lin Song said that our architects did not have enough thinking and precipitation of their own culture, and they just copied foreign ones. If things go on like this, foreign architects will rush to China. In fact, this is because our culture has no roots. If our generation is reduced to working for others and drawing construction drawings, then this entire generation will be pathetic.
Lin Song believes that Western culture mainly comes from marine civilization, and the architectural expression is very public and progressive, while Chinese culture is more about harmony, and the architectural temperament emphasizes "elegance". The two have their own merits, but many Chinese architects lack cultural self-confidence, blindly pursue the westernization of architecture, and lose themselves.
In 2006, Lin Song took over the project of the World Leisure Expo. Lin Song went to Venice for several times, the longest time for half a month, to feel the style and culture of Venice.
Lin Song lived in a hotel at the time. The hotel is an old building. The bathroom is on the east side, and the wall is painted with red color. When the morning sun comes in, the whole room is bright. Venice has a Mediterranean climate, the weather is sunny and cloudless, and the locals are unrestrained and enthusiastic and like such bright things. But as a Chinese, Lin Song found it difficult to adapt.
As Lin Song said, Chinese souls may not be very comfortable living in the shell of the West. In the process of fusion of Eastern and Western cultures, we certainly cannot stand still and refuse to make progresses, but we must not forget the inner essence of "origin" and "root". Nowadays, many architects can't find the "root" of their culture when designing, which leads to a deep spiritual division of the people who live in the building. Lin Song sighed that it would be very sad if our generation was like this.
Lin Song, who loves traditional culture, instinctively applies it to architectural design. He told us earnestly that the admiration for traditional culture is no longer a simple expression, which has become the shadow of his architectural design. Lin Song and his team never follow the script, but are committed to developing and innovating traditional Chinese culture, adhering to the concept of harmony between man and nature, and designing urban architecture with Chinese characteristics
In designing the Yangzhou Slender West Lake Tangjun Project, Lin Song led the team to integrate the meander of Shugang West Peak and the beauty and grace of Slender West Lake into the design. Combining the modern life form and traditional spatial pattern, he established the residential entry pattern with the ancient pattern between streets and lanes, reproducing the hidden and beautiful residences with "hidden mountains and remote waters", and realizing the integration of humanistic care and spiritual pursuit of communication and introspective.
Architecture is not for a little complex retro, but should be adapted to the habits of modern people. This is exactly what Lin Song emphasized, "architecture should be presented in the way of integrating traditional culture and modern expression."
"Everyone says that Jiangnan is good, and tourists want to stay in Jiangnan forever. Here the spring water is clear and green, and you can sleep on a boat while listening to the rain." Most of the projects undertaken by Lin Song are located in Jiangnan water towns, such as Yangzhou, where "my old friend farewells to the Yellow Crane Tower in the west, and travels to Yangzhou in a flourishing scene of prosperity", Hangzhou, where "the West Lake is very beautiful, its water is bright and clear in the sun and when it rains, the mountains far away are veiled in moisture", and Suzhou, where "the bells of Hanshan Temple outside the ancient city of Suzhou reaches Passenger Ships”. Suzhou is known as the "city of gardens", which "recreate the universe within a short distance", also gave him a lot of inspiration.
In the Mudu Imperial Mansion Project in Suzhou, Lin Song's team inherited the essence of Suzhou architecture by combing and interpreting the existing urban texture and context of the ancient town, and expressed the urban texture incisively and vividly in the form of alleys and building clusters. Based on the bionic radial system and combined with the space form of alleys, the layout method of Suzhou traditional gardens and the residential texture of multi-entry courtyards are absorbed.
In a modern city with developed industrial civilization, Lin Song and his team have always advocated returning to traditional Chinese culture, so that people can experience the unique charm and vitality of farming civilization, and a fresh air is injected into the city. He also clearly understands that this kind of advocacy is not a simple and tough retro, but to promote the oriental culture among the materialistic modern cities, so that the world can see the mainstream characteristics of Chinese civilized cities.
To contribute to the construction career, Lin Song has more lofty ambitions. In the future, Lin Song hopes to use his knowledge of traditional culture to devote himself to building an architectural system theory with the basis of oriental thought and culture and doing some in-depth research and understanding on the value system of oriental culture, so that Chinese architectural culture can take a place in the world.
Lin Song said that Chinese culture has given architecture a very deep spiritual world and cognition, and we need to show it to the world. On the road of showing Chinese culture, he hopes that more local designers can move forward with him.
Author：Li Jianyu Lei Sunqu Chen Ying
