Taking the ancient folk houses in Lingfengzhai—a famous historical and cultural village as the example,the structure and tectonic features of the brick-stone wall in this area were analyzed,and the essence of traditional folk houses were demonstrated to readers from the perspective of stonework crafts.
Even since the primitive society,large-size steep ditches have been applied for building settlements as defense.In turbulent periods,many villages with considerable economic strength chose to live in a closed and safe space by building village walls.For those ancient villages,walls were not only solidly built,they also constructed the overall layouts of villages by integrating traditional city planning thoughts and were limited by both spiritual civilization and building technologies.In this study,the authors studied walls of Linfeng Village,and found that the overall design of these walls were closely combined with macro and micro terrains of the village,which fully demonstrated the site selection principle for building villages and fortresses in China,that is,"occupying the high,closing to water".The wall details also satisfied multiple functional demands,such as defense,passage,sense of security and so on.In addition,walls and gateways also showed people the regional diversity of Chinese construction techniques.
