The Bagua as an Intermediary between Archaic Chinese Geomancy and Early European Urban Planning and Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Present-day concerns with urban design for pedestrians largely surround the issue of microclimate in streetscapes. Such concerns are not new and have been extensively discussed during the European Renaissance. Western historical references on urban design and microclimate primarily converge on a single source: The octagonal, radial-centric plan of an ideal city in Book I of the Ten Books of Architecture written in the late first century BCE by Marcus Vitruvius Polio. As his own source Vitruvius pointed to the Tower of the Winds in Athens, designed c. 50 BCE by Andronicus of Cyrrhus on an octagonal plan, respectful of eight wind directions. We posit that octagonal Bagua geomantic map made its way from Chang’an in China to Cyrrhus in western Asia during the first century BCE, and was possibly one of two sources that stirred Andronicus toward his design of the tower, the other source being the Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria. The Bagua corresponds to the Luo Shu magic square that guided the ideal city plan of Han China, while the octagon, through Vitruvius, inspired several city plans in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Beyond the rainbow of multiple impact on Roman urbanism from neighboring civilizations, the ancient Chinese ideal city plan through the intermediary of the Bagua, may also have played a role in Vitruvius’ own ideal city plan, by way of the Tower of the Winds. The environmental message of the Bagua, thus, has possibly carried an indirect impact upon Renaissance and Baroque urbanism, and upon urbanist concerns lasting to this day.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".