The Habitation Forms and Common-Life-Sense of Traditional Collective Environments―A Behavioral-Environmental Case Study on Hakka Tulou―

Abstract

This study observed the habitation forms and the daily life in Hakka Tulou, which are the traditional collective housing in the western part of Fujian Province in China, created in Ming dynasty and still in use for living in the present. Through the environment-behavior analyses of the relationships between the spatial structure and the daily life of the residents living there, we clarified the habitation forms of the Hakka Tulou and gave the following three research results. First, the whole structure of Hakka Tulou is characterized by “closed” spaces from the outside and “open” spaces to the interior. In addition, the daily life of residents finds “openness” to the inside, while it is considered that residents and Hakka Tulou environment can mutually penetrate into each other by the co-visibility in their daily lives, and the distinctive life sensation was born from the sharing of the place. Furthermore, based on the Kurokawa’s theory of the Intermediate Space (1983/2006), we found the fact that Hakka Tulou had the character of the middle area in variety of shared spaces. From a theoretical consideration on the relation between the spatial structure of Hakka Tulou and daily life, the notion of “intermediate area” was finally proposed.