• Archives of design research
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.173-184
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• 1998

This study deals with the visual quality in the future urban landscape and architectural environment, and as such, aims to identify a scientific and objective aesthetic and visual quality from the perspective of empirical aesthetics. The empirical aesthetics provides a framework that can be utilized in understanding human perception, consciousness, and behavior and a way to categorize the visual quality and to explain and predict its effect. The study examines various theories on environmental perception, cognition, and some new approaches to environmental aesthetics, and tries to present aesthetic properties that can be applied to environmental design. First, the aesthetic experience in visual perception can be defined as a combined effect of psychobiological properties and human activity, i.e. an interaction between the formal and symbolic signs in environment and the conceptual framework of man. The effect of visual quality differs and varies a great deal, depending on the sociocultural, personal and collective value system, so it is hard to define it in absolute terms. Second, the impact of visual quality and its aesthetic effect has to do with pleasure, preference, the aptitude for survival, and self regulation. Third, aesthetics is one of the areas that can benefit a great deal from an interdisciplinary approach. and an empirical study such as this can be used as a basis for design, planning, and evaluation.