With the basic realization of comprehensive poverty alleviation, China's rural revitalization has entered a new stage. Improving the environment, renewing industries, promoting governance, and inheriting culture are all problems that are unavoidable but difficult to be solved individually today. Establishing effective connections between art design and rural environmental systems and keeping continuous interaction between them lead to a holistic solution to these problems. Based on the practice of environmental design in Songyang County, Zhejiang Province, through the "place" theory method, the work discusses how design can take into account the observation of natural environment, the construction of artificial environment and the cultivation of social environment from identification, orientation, and belongingness, to improve the quality of the environment in an integral and deep-level way and solve the civilization crisis. It is concluded that the overall design of the rural environment from the perspective of "place" can help us explore a contemporary rural developing way that is both based on reality and in line with China’s history and cultural lineage.