Introduction

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.

The systematic, empirical, and often experimental study of aesthetics has been under way since the pioneering work of Fechner (1876). This research has focused mainly on the formal issues of pattern perception, sequential experiencing of vistas, definition of complexity and simplicity, and form empathy. There are many limitations to this research, but it has yielded a number of positive, if controversial, statements on formal aesthetics (e.g., Arnheim, 1977; Kepes, 1944). The research has not, however, yielded much in attaining an understanding of symbolic meanings, the importance of these meanings to people, or the enjoyment that people derive from them.