Research on the construction of rural interface style based on aesthetic rules

When the form, material and colour have the similarity, the style tends to be clear, and the keynote is slow and soft. Due to the long-term spontaneous construction process in rural areas, villagers have spontaneously constructed the residential form based on ‘prototype imitation’, so many similar aesthetics in the rural environment can be found, such as similar construction styles and decoration features in the original environment. For example, in the reconstruction of Daye home stay in Mogan mountain, several parallel houses apply similar symbols of the slope top, Dai tile and pink wall elements to achieve a high degree of coordination in form, material and colour (Table 1-a), as well as the expansion of the Joslyn Art Museum (Table 1-b).

Generally, new forms and new functional forms are embedded in the context of the old place, but the harmonious relationship with the old place is realised through the similarity of material and colour. The Lorette monastery in Belgium (Table 2-a) is a traditional architectural style with a continuous sloping roof. In its expansion design, the DMV architecture office applies the extension of modern block volume. The forms of roof, doors and windows are compared with the original historical buildings in different styles of tradition and modernity. In order to realise the coordination between history and modernity, the facade wall of the new building adopts the method of small brick masonry and lime plastering consistent with the original building so as to realise the continuity between the old and the new through the similarity of facade material and colour. Skilfully, the designer made the light yellow of the new building to be weaker than the white of the old building, weakening the prominence of the new building, still set off the old building as the main body of the interface, and maintained the original atmosphere of the place.

While the similarity of shape and structure is high, and the difference of colour and material is large, it generally constitutes coordination of strong contrast. In the expansion project of Tangshe Hotel in Yangshuo, Guangxi (Table 3-a), the new building is made of white concrete, which forms a strong contrast with the old residential buildings in material and colour, but its pitched roof and facade windows still maintain the relevance with the original building.

The opposite of similarity is difference. Similarity reflects the convergence and coordination between things, and the difference reflects the contrast between things. Simple similarity is easy to make the viewer feel monotonous due to the lack of contrast and change. For example, the barracks layout in new rural areas often produces aesthetic fatigue due to the high similarity between elements. The difference contrast will enhance the local variability and create a new visual attraction. About the uncoordinated things in the three aspects of ‘material, colour and form’, a new overall relationship will be generated in the organic juxtaposition, that is, the aesthetic connotation under the new coordinated relationship will be generated due to the complementarity between differentiated things.

Koolhaas studied the overall relationship of the industrial park for Prada Foundation in Milan (Table 3-b) and made use of the inclusiveness of the factory space to shape the diversity of the environment space. While retaining seven historic buildings of different shapes, three new modern cube buildings with metal colour, white concrete and foamed aluminium skin form a strong contrast with the entire historical environment. From the style and effect perspective, the new building is embedded to expand the art space type, highlighting its identification through different materials and bringing a fashion industrial sense that is not in contradiction with the old industrial atmosphere. Therefore, the old and new buildings do not merge into a whole image in the case of multiple juxtaposition. Instead, on the premise of maintaining mutual independence, they obtain the fusion of complementary and differences through the implication of themselves and space.

The new aesthetic implication formed by the complementarity of differences is the condition and reason for the juxtaposition of completely different things. Whether the juxtaposition of completely different elements can be established depends on the height of the aesthetic meaning of the overall relationship formed by complementarity. Its high aesthetic level forms the coordination under strong contrast. On the contrary, if the aesthetic level is low, it will constitute conflict, opposition and confusion.

The formation of environmental style is closely related to the viewer’s visual and psychological experience. Human vision has the characteristics of selectivity and integrity. Psychologist Rudolf Arnheim [12] proposed that ‘vision is completely a positive activity’. It not only passively accepts external objects and activities but also actively has the tendency to watch something. It is easy to catch flashing things in space, find their boundaries and essence and ignore meaningless things. Therefore, it further proposes that people have the consciousness characteristic of ‘pre-matching’: when the expected schema appears in our vision, our attention will not be attracted by it, and the structure in this schema will sink to the threshold of our consciousness, as translated by Yang Siliang et al. It is pointed out that vision is not sensitive to the schema within the expected range. Arnheim [13] has further put forward the ‘continuity’ theory: ‘when observing a certain pattern, the viewer will grasp a special law and repeatedly imagine this law. When there is a ‘interruption’ in one or several places in the process of the continuation of this law, it will stimulate the viewer’s attention, and this accident or deviation will bring visual pleasure to the viewer’.

Therefore, under the continuous and repeated graphic sequence, the interruption is the ‘visual difference point’ that attracts people’s attention. This visual rule is applied to the construction of the rural style. If there are several variations in the repeated interface, the viewer is easy to be attracted and to have a profound experience.

Vision has a numbness sense to repetitive and tedious things, while it also has an aversion to messy and complicated forms. ‘Aesthetic pleasure comes from the appreciation of a certain pattern between boring and messy. Monotonous patterns are difficult to attract people’s attention, and overly complex patterns will make our perceptual load too heavy and stop viewing it’ [14]. It explains the importance of human visual perception to the balance and coordination between ‘diversity and unity’.

The visual view of the interface separates the background from the graphics, the main elements and the negative space. As shown in the Rubin cup (Figure 5), it is easier for the eye to see a vase. Therefore, what is convex is easily taken as the subject of the figure, and what is concave is easily taken as the background. The relationship between the picture bottom and surface reflects the possibility of creating the transformation between the prominent elements and the background.

Fig. 5

The focus principle helps to create the visual level and centre. The diagonals in Annie Leibovitz’s photography define the picture centre, while the two sides of the centre balance the image in a dynamic symmetry while arranging the context of the elements (Figure 6). Therefore, when multiple elements are juxtaposed in the picture, the form and colour of the elements can be changed to control the visual weight and highlight their dominant position so as to form a visual neglect to negative information.

Fig. 6

The transformation relies on the weak contrast and coordination between the old and new buildings in terms of material, colour and shape and uses the logical series of regional architectural shape symbols to eliminate the disharmonious interface conflict. At the same time, some disharmonious or degraded old buildings are demolished and integrated into the new architectural shape to realise the orderly coordination of street and lane interface style. First, the regional construction form system are summarised and integrated, the representative element symbols are extracted and the transformation mode of old and new buildings is established in a logical series way, such as strengthening the correlation of detail decoration such as ‘door and window style, guardrail component and moulding foot style’, emphasising the unity of the ground pavement and the difference of the chimeric bottom relationship, so as to form the potential joint relationship between new and old buildings. At the same time, while maintaining the similarity of the overall sense, we should pay attention to the rhythm control and variability of similar component symbols so as to realise the weak contrast and coordination of features under the aesthetics of similarity.

The streets and alleys of Fotang town in Zhejiang are mostly wooden shops built in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China. The first floor consists of shops along the street, and the second floor has housing with decorative balconies. The interface construction attempt to keep the original pattern sequence, and every other room is replaced by a modern two-story residential pattern with a balcony (Figure 7). The remodelling of the balconies with concrete latticed balconies and the re-plastering of the facades transformed part of the house into a simple residence. The roof of the buildings along the street still has the same sloping green tiled surface. Although the shape and system of the streets are the same after the reconstruction, the slates embedded in the balconies are rich and changeable such as louvre-shaped, pentagonal with running deer pattern and double seagull pattern from left to right. Buildings of two eras and houses with two different functions are displayed side by side on the same interface. Under the unity of eaves and volume, each house has some differences. The aesthetic value of this interface lies in the low contrast and coordination between neighbours, with a regular and orderly substitution and logical symbol intervention [15].

Fig. 7

Date division clearly emphasises the developing route of the village, including multiple forms of historical periods and different stages of the development path from traditional to modern. Allowing different historical stage construction parallel exists, namely ‘building the juxtaposition of different era, in which each is its era expression’ [16], so as to show the multiple attribute information and aesthetics generated settlement under the time series.

Daling village in Panyu, Guangzhou, is a famous historical and cultural village with a long history and contains various types of historical buildings. On the basis of the protection and repair of the site’s architectural heritage, a certain number of characteristic historical dwellings of the Republic of China period and the Cultural Revolution period were retained, and part of the incongruity buildings were properly updated to form a diverse interface of building, such as blue brick houses, red brick houses and stone and rice houses (Figure 8). In Figure 9, the flat roofs of yellow grey sand houses and stone rice houses are retained in the interface facing the water, forming the interface features of flat roof and inclined roof of cyan and yellow. The red brick houses and element details retained in the main street become the highlights the active interface.

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Through the renewal of materials, colours and forms, the contrast with the old environment can be realised, showing the new and old derivative process of ‘traditional modern’. In the rural reconstruction of Shangping village in Fujian Province, the designer transformed the unused sundry shed in the village into a ‘colourful cloud room’ (Figure 10) and embedded coloured wooden windows on the external facade. The change of colour added a little dramatic ‘conflict’ to the ancient village. The old cowshed at the entrance of the village was transformed into a rural book bar. Retaining the original stone wall, the traditional sloping roof and wooden frame form were used. The facade was integrated with modern materials to reflect the modern sense. Based on the neutral contrast and coordination of the single level such as material and colour, it is easy to realise the orderly evolution of architectural interface in a relatively harmonious way.

Fig. 10

The new building and the traditional building have a contrast relationship in materials, colours and forms, showing a derivative sequence between the new and old from tradition to modern. Various construction types constitute a new interface under multiple contrast between modernity and tradition.

Wen village is a traditional village in Fuyang town, Zhejiang Province. In the past 10 years of development, with the degradation of regional buildings in the village, the local style began to be chaotic (Figure 11). In the reconstruction of Wen village, Architect Wang Shu explored the new overall relationship of style in the way of ‘juxtaposition of strong contrast between the old and the new’ and expressed his guiding thinking on the future development of the countryside. On the basis of maintaining the original village pattern, alley and walkway texture, some disharmonious ceramic tiled houses were transformed and rebuilt, some traditional houses were retained and repaired, and more than 10 new houses in the modern context were built at the peripheral water interface. The designer absorbs the colours of traditional architectural symbols, adopts the traditional processes and materials of rammed earth wall, plastered wall, Hangzhou limestone wall and chopping axe stone, and integrates modern formal beauty, functional pattern and structural technology to complete the single design of rammed earth building, Hangzhou limestone building, two-slope top, single slope top and other forms, forming the interface tone of grey, white and yellow. At the same time, the inner corner space of the village is also filled with the contrast and integration of new and old, and new and new so as to construct a new overall relationship and guidance system between village tradition and modernity (Figure 12). Multiple comparisons emphasise the reinterpretation of traditional meaning by modern language and fit the implied spirit of traditional construction in a new form. It internally maintains the cultural inheritance based on the result of technological progress and completes the inheritance and reproduction of the local context with a new holistic relationship.

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Based on the translation of the skin style of multiple monomers, the conflict of the whole fragment is lowered and the overall aesthetic feeling is changed. Translation is a special behaviour in linguistics that transforms a kind of language information into another language information [17]. Rural construction in the focus on the architectural representation language transformation, obtain the language of the original building (building style, decoration style) gene and the relationship between the remodelling after break, or to pavilions are not harmonious construction change skin, or the sudden local facade adopts covered by green plants; Or the translation of different styles of a certain part and side of multiple monomers, so that the representation is presented in a more distinct form, and the local interface features of multiple slices are formed in the rural space, so as to realize the joint relationship and organic organization of spatial sequence changes.

Based on the selectivity and integrity of visual meaning, create features and intermittently make node changes for the interface with high repetition of form so as to form the variability under the unity of the interface. At the planning level, multiple continuous parking nodes can be consciously created, and each node strengthens the style characteristics of important scenes to give the viewer the overall style experience. For example, when people watch in the village road, the architectural sections appear in sequence. These style nodes not only show the village image from the static picture but also become a continuous picture in the dynamic scene with the sequence connection between them. The viewer will connect the complete rural style image from the succeeding style interface.

Based on the aesthetic law of the relationship between visual matching and the bottom of the picture, the emphasised and neglected contents should be distinguished in the style construction so as to reasonably arrange the spatial order relationship, for example, emphasise the highlights in the cluttered space, making the cluttered interface an easy-to-ignore background at the bottom of the picture, allowing people to focus on new element images and, at the same time, pay attention to the hierarchical relationship of close range, medium range and long range, to focus on the core point as the necessary strategy in the space. (1) Leading level: It mostly appears in the middle position. (2) Sublevel: It is weaker than the main level, and most of the pictures are located on one side or in close range. (3) Subordinate level: The visual weight is low and generally retreats to the background position. The highlights that need to be emphasized in the rural disordered interface, place them in the core position or the middle position, and obscure or hide the miscellaneous elements or place them in the background, so that people can ignore the unimportant elements and leave a deep impression on the key elements.

Fig. 13

For this problem of ceramic tiled houses and the traditional dwelling interface, some meaningful landscape narrative spaces are established by using the intermediary space between the houses in the village, and new landscape forms such as treillage and thatched huts are included in the spatial pattern, forming a new focus of the space in front of the building. In the courtyard or roof, similar structures are built to increase the similarity between the units, and the disharmonious elements are diluted and shielded; or demolish individual buildings to expand the rural space, or repair with other landscape structures to change the local interface style of the village.