It is widely accepted that the traditional houses in China have the
Siheyuan (court yard house with four buildings) form and the [yiming
liangan] type is the basic unit as the planning composition. One of its
typical character is the number of spans between pillars was commonly even
number. The other one is it has symmetric property, one hall in the center
and two bedroom on both side. Nevertheless, in the huge loess land of
Northwestern China, there exist a lot of houses whose basic unit of the
planning composition is the [one room] type or the [yiming yian] type as
well as the [yiming liangan] type. The characteristic of those houses is
naturally, different from that of the [yiming liangan] type not only in the
form but in life style. The author define it [Non-yiming liangan] type, the
purpose of this paper is to clarifies its characteristic.
As the method, the only way we can do is doing fieldwork, because there
aren't so many data about it. Since 1988, we have done fieldwork for 11
times, in the area of ShaanXi Province, ShanXi Province, HeNan Province, HeBei
Province and BeiJing. About 400 plans of traditinal house in total have
been collected.
As the result, the gate of [Non-yiming liangan] type Siheyuan are always
in the east-south of the house, the yard is very long and thin. Regard the
[one room] type house, ZhengFang (Main building) is one-room which have 3 or
5 spans, used for ceremony or reception only, not to be used for bedroom.
XiangFang (Side building) is one-room too, has odd number of the span, and
used for bedroom. And the most basic unit are 2 spans, the other are consist
of the one-room with 2 spans. MenFang (Gate building) is used as bedroom of
parents, XiangFang is used for children household. The one-room type bedroom
are used for almost all action of the daily life, include sleep, meal, work, and reception of nuclear family. At present, with the
collapse of big family in old time, they havn't many chance to do ceremony
like old time, ZhengFang lost its use value, just be used as warehouse at the present.
In the other hand, [yiming yian] type has non-symmetric property, one hall
and one bedroom. Hall is twice as bedroom. Space differentiation can be
considerated from [one room] type.
As it is shown above, [Non-yiming liangan] type distribute widly in the
huge loess land of Northwestern China.It havn't symmetric propertyodd
number of the span, and some of them have odd number of the span, which are
different from that of the [yiming liangan] type. And the characteristics
in life style are also very different.