Chinese men of letters pursued the idea of a poetic life in feudal times, and this ideal was often embodied in traditional gardening and landscape paintings. This notion of a sense of poetry was often understood as cohering in moments when the body comes cross certain living situations that generate sensations or emotions. Its sense is assumed to be something gained through the body's immediate perceptions rather than understood through linguistic constructions. This sense of poetry was assumed to originate in traditional Chinese aesthetics associated with a combination of bodily sensation, natural landscapes, and the rhythms of everyday life.However, it has been argued that the pursuit of this traditional notion of poetic life has been lost with the arrival of modernity. In this view, Chinese cities are seen as losing their identities and becoming Westernised. Wang Shu, the Pritzker Prize-winning Chinese architect, has taken great efforts to rebuild an understanding of Chinese cultural identity: by looking back to the idea of poetic life reflected in traditional gardens and landscape paintings, and attempting to recompose a sense of poetry for contemporary architecture. There is, in traditional aesthetics, a strong sense of connection between gardening and landscape paintings, in their poetic sense. Wang's intention seems to take a leap forward to put contemporary architecture into this alliance. This article aims to examine Wang's approaches to this sense of poetry in one of his projects, the design of Xiangshan campus while, at the same time, seeking to offer a Chinese reflection on the architecture of poetry.
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