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. Recognizing that humans, along with all other things, inhabit a single intraconnected realm, he names the quality of engagement as the foremost characteristic of environmental perception. Berleant moves from natural to nonnatural environments, suggesting that the aesthetic aspect of any human habitat is an essential part of its desirability. From outer space to the museum, from architecture to landscape, from city to wilderness, this book discovers in the aesthetic perception of environment the reciprocity that constitutes both person and place.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

Ch. 1   Environment as a Challenge to Aesthetics                             

Ch. 2   The Aesthetic Sense of Environment                                     

Ch. 3   Descriptive Aesthetics

Ch. 4   Scenes from a Connecticut Landscape:  Four Studies in  Descriptive Aesthetics

Ch. 5   Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology                           

Ch. 6   Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic                                                           

Ch. 7   Designing Outer Space 

Ch. 8   The Museum of Art as a Participatory Environment  

Ch. 9   Environmental Criticism

Ch.10   Environment as an Aesthetic Paradigm                                  

Ch.11   The Aesthetics of Art and Nature                                         

Ch.12   Reclaiming the American Landscape                                    

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