This work tries to answer the question of "How can architectural history have an impact on architectural design today?". It is based on two historical clues: one is the progressive history of conception of space in the Western architectural theory field, linking with the nowadays spatial design; the other one is a retroactive research on ancient Chinese scholar gardens, that will put this research object in the perspective of spatial investigation. This research is interested in the cross-culture exploration, moreover, due to the fact that in ancient China the idea of a subject classification was quite different from the western one, this research should be considered as a cross-discipinary one, too.