The Creation of Complexity in Chinese Garden

Abstract

Chinese garden was designed to allow its owner to feel the beauty of nature in a congested city. Therefore, one of its main design principles is to make the space feel bigger than its real size, in other words, the creation of complexity. Former studies of traditional Chinese garden were mostly qualitative analysis. This paper applied the space syntax approach to study its spatial design. Two gardens (Guo’s Villa in Hangzhou and Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou) with similar sizes were selected as comparative case studies. To analyze the effect of spatial complexity to human’s behavior and cognition, movement tracing and questionnaire were used to collect behavioral and cognitive data. To analyze the spatial complexity in two gardens quantitatively, VGA analysis in the Depthmap software was used. By putting the spatial attributes of the gardens and the visitors’ activities in them together, the authors find out that: firstly, by different ways of partition and composition, sites with similar size could result to dissimilar feelings; secondly, create a mismatched system of walkability and visibility is an effective way for the creation of complexity.