In everyday life, most people do not reflect seriously on the impacts of architecture and environmental aesthetics on their well-being and health. Originally published in 2001 as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series,reissued now with a new series introduction, Aesthetics, Well-being and Health: Essays within Architecture and Environmental Aesthetics, is an intriguing volume bringing together professionals working in archi...

One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experienceTaking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate h...

Experiential Landscape offers new ways of looking at the relationship between people and the outdoor open spaces they use in their everyday lives. The book takes a holistic view of the relationship between humans and their environment, integrating experiential and spatial dimensions of the outdoors, and exploring the theory and application of environmental design disciplines, most notably landscape architecture and urban design.The book explores specific settings in which ...

Practice-led research is a burgeoning area across the creative arts, with studio informed doctorates frequently favoured over traditional approaches to research. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry is specifically designed as a training tool and is structured on the model used by most research programmes. A comprehensive introduction lays out the book's framework and individual chapters provide concrete examples of studio-based research in art, film and video...

The Philosophy of Design is an introduction to the fundamental philosophical issues raised by the contemporary practice of design. The first book to systematically examine design from the perspective of contemporary philosophy, it offers a broad perspective, ranging across key philosophical areas such as aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics and ethics.The first part of the book explores central issues about the nature of design and its products, and the rationality of des...

This astonishing book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions. It:introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audienceprovides ...

This international and illustrated work challenges current writings focussing on the problems of urban public space to present a more nuanced and dialectical conception of urban life.Detailed and extensive international urban case studies show how urban open spaces are used for play, which is defined and discussed using Caillois' four-part definition – competition, chance, simulation and vertigo. Stevens explores and analyzes these case studies according to locations where play has...

Towards the Museum of the Future explores, through a series of authoritative essays, some of the major developments in European museums as they struggle to adapt in a rapidly changing world. It embraces a wide range of European countries, all types of museums and exhibitions and the needs of different museum audiences, and discusses the museum as communicator and educator in the context of current cultural concerns.

Answering key questions in the study of how museums communicate, Louise Ravelli provides a set of frameworks to investigate the complexities of communication in museums:* What is an appropriate level of complexity for a written label?* Why do some choice in language make a more direct relation to visitors?* Is there a correct way of presenting a particular view of content?* How do design practices contribute to the overall meanings being made?The framew...

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as informing renowned schools of architectural theory, notably those around Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Pérez-Gómez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people’s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement wit...

Revealing Architectural Design examines the architectural design process from the point of view of knowledge domains, domain syntax, coherence, framing, thinking styles, decision-making and testing. Using straightforward language, the book connects general design thinking to underlying frameworks that are used in the architectural design process.The book provides historical grounding as well as clear examples of real design outcomes. It includes diagrams and explanations t...

Exhibition environments are enticingly complex spaces: as facilitators of experience; as free-choice learning contexts; as theaters of drama; as encyclopedic warehouses of cultural and natural heritage; as two-, three- and four-dimensional storytellers; as sites for self-actualizing leisure activity. But how much do we really know about the moment-by-moment transactions that comprise the intricate experiences of visitors? To strengthen the disciplinary knowledge base supporting exhibition ...