Main entry:

Berleant, Arnold, 1932-

Title & Author:

The aesthetics of environment / Arnold Berleant.

Publication:

Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1992.

Description:

xv, 218 pages ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-208) and index.
1. Environment as a Challenge to Aesthetics -- 2. The Aesthetic Sense of Environment -- 3. Descriptive Aesthetics -- 4. Scenes from a Connecticut Landscape: Four Studies in Descriptive Aesthetics -- 5. Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology -- 6. Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic -- 7. Designing Outer Space -- 8. The Museum of Art as a Participatory Environment -- 9. Environmental Criticism -- 10. Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm -- 11. The Aesthetics of Art and Nature -- 12. Reclaiming the American Landscape.

Summary:

Environmental aesthetics is an emerging discipline that explores the meaning and influence of environmental perception and experience on human life. Arguing for the idea that environment is not merely a setting for people but fully integrated and continuous with us, Arnold Berleant explores the aesthetic dimensions of the human-environment continuum in both theoretical terms and concrete situations. Insisting on the need to reconceptualize environment and recognize its aesthetic implications, he pursues a variety of topics and approaches to environmental aesthetics. Aesthetic experience, maintains Berleant, is always contextual. There is no inside and outside, person and environment, human being and external world. Recognizing that humans, along with all other things, inhabit a single intraconnected realm, he speaks of environment as "a seamless unity of organism, perception, and place" that is suffused with values. The foremost characteristic of environmental perception, then, is the quality of engagement. Berleant moves from natural to non-natural environments, suggesting that the aesthetic aspect of any human habitat is an essential part of its desirability. After explaining the concept of environment and the possibilities of describing our aesthetic responses to various sorts of environments, Berleant applies his phenomenologically descriptive aesthetics to a broad range of issues and situations. From outer space to the museum, from architecture to landscape, from city to countryside to wilderness, this book discovers in the aesthetic perception of environment the reciprocity that constitutes both person and place.

Resources:
Table of contents

ISBN:

0877229937 (cloth)
9780877229933 (cloth)
9781566393348 (Pbk)
1566393345 (Pbk)

Subject:

Landscape assessment.
Environment (Aesthetics)
Nature (Aesthetics)
Paysages Évaluation.
Environnement (Esthétique)
Nature (Esthétique)
PHILOSOPHY Aesthetics.
PHILOSOPHY General.
Omgeving.
Landschappen.
Esthetica.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 91953
Call No.: ID:93-B56
Status: Available