Architecture as Environmental Design

The perception of the physical environment resembles the experience of landscape painting, although differences appear in its sensory modalities, in the force and directness of what is present to us, in the overtness and movement of engagement. The objects of the ordinary world often impose themselves forcibly on our thoughts and actions, and our involvement with them is likely to be active as well as reciprocal. Environmental perception, moreover, holds implications for action that bridge the traditional gulf between aesthetic pleasure and practical action. As the painting was transformed from an object into a region of active experience, our perception of environment turns us from imaginative participants into real agents whose salient sensory modality is kinesthetic. We become actors in the theater of landscape, to use a metaphor popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We are the performers in the art of environment