Mathematically Defining and Parametrically Generating Traditional Chinese Private Gardens of the Suzhou Region and Style

Abstract

The Traditional Chinese Private Garden is a historically and socially significant landscape type that features multiple complex planning elements. Whereas there are many different examples of Traditional Chinese Private Gardens, the small gardens of Suzhou make up a distinct subset. This paper describes a method for mathematically capturing and then parametrically generating, new instances of what might be called the small ‘Suzhou type’, which features some of the same social and cognitive spatial properties as the historic cases. The research commences with a mathematical analysis of three historic Suzhou Traditional Chinese Private Gardens before using connectivity graphs to investigate their properties. Mathematical measurements derived from the Traditional Chinese Private Gardens are then used as rules for a parametric system to generate new instances of the Suzhou type. In the paper, three new Suzhou type connectivity and spatio-typological systems are generated and tested against the properties of the historic cases. Through this process, the paper demonstrates a method for capturing distinct social and cognitive properties in a parametric system and thereby derives possible new insights into these important heritage sites. This method may also be applied to the analysis and generation of different spatial types.