Landscape Evolution of Historic Campuses from the Perspective of Historic Layering: A Case Study of Three University Campuses in Nanjing, China

Abstract

As China's social development enters a new stage of connotative progression, campus heritage is attracting attention as an essential part of the cultural landscape in historic cities. Historic campuses are the spatial carriers of campus heritage, a superimposed collage of campus landscapes from multiple historical periods with outstanding value. Campus space presents the development history of campus planning and construction concepts, showing the unique cultural connotation. Related research has expanded from studying "points" of historic buildings to the holistic study of "surfaces" such as spatial patterns and landscape environments.With the support of "Historic Layering" and "Anchoring-Layering" in the theory of historic urban landscape (HUL), this article takes the three cases of Southeast University (Sipailou Campus), Nanjing University (Gulou Campus), and Nanjing Normal University (Suiyuan Campus) to interpret landscape evolution of historic campuses in Nanjing. Combining the technical support of campus planning and construction drawings from different decades with historical photos, documents, and on-site surveys, the dynamic process characteristics and layering rules of campus landscape are investigated under the constant collision and compromise between planning ideals and social reality.The study found that the historic campuses show the evolutionary characteristics of the hybridization and collage of multiple landscapes and the spatial and temporal correlation between architecture and environmental elements in landscape shaping from the early architectural dominance to the late architectural and environmental co-action. Moreover, different campuses have unique landscape characters, especially the pre-1949 campuses dominated by Western classicism or the Chinese-Western fusion, which has become an essential cultural gene of the campus.This can serve as a reference for cultural interpretation of the historic campus landscape's dynamic evolution and characterizing the contemporary campus space.