초록
This essay addresses the role of environmental aesthetics in landscape architecture : how can environmental aesthetics enrich landscape architectural theory and practice\ulcorner It begins by criticizing the predominant notions toward theory : theory as an instrumental design method, theoretical vacuum in modernism of landscape architecture, and the intimate relation of theory and practice in 18th-century England. It suggests that the expulsion of theory in landscape architectural academics and profession is nothing but an inappropriate bias. In the second place, the essay explores a remaining question : why environmental aesthetics is a part of landscape architectural theory\ulcorner I would argue that environmental aesthetics can transcend the man-nature(subject-object) dichotomy, one of heritages of Western modernity project. Here, landscape architecture meets environmental aesthetics, and both can intermediate between theory and practice. For landscape architecture is (and ought to be) a device of embodied communication, creating symbolic settings wherein an interconnection of man and nature can occur. Finally, this essay examines the aesthetics of engagement that Arnold Berleant claimed recently. This theory of aesthetic experience has a possibility of making corrections some improper conventions in landscape architectural creation and appreciation : disinterested contemplation, visual-orientedness, decoration-denteredness, and so forth. I would conclude that environmental aesthetics can be a significant theory which can correct misconceptions in landscape design and appreciation and, further, can lead contemporary practice. As the great mediator between man and nature, between theory and practice, environmental aesthetics has a profound role to play in the realm of landscape architecture, and vice versa.