Symbolic aesthetics in architecture: toward a research agenda

Abstract

One of the fundamental goals of design has always been the aesthetic one-the creation of "delightful" rooms, buildings, townscapes, and landscapes. In attempting to understand the nature of the aesthetic experience, a number of people (e.g., Santayana, 1896) have found it useful to distinguish among sensory, formal, and symbolic interactions between people and their built environments. Sensory aesthetics is concerned with the pleasurableness of the sensations received from the environment. It involves the arousal of one's perceptual systems, is multidimensional, and results from the colors, odors, sounds, and textures of the environment. Formal aesthetics in architecture is concerned primarily with the appreciation of the shapes, rhythms, complexities, and sequences of the visual world, although the concepts can be extended to the sonic, olfactory, and haptic worlds. The appreciation of the associational meanings of the environment that give people pleasure is the subject matter of symbolic aesthetics.