Output details

Pragmatic vision: connecting aesthetics, materiality and culture in landscape architectural practice

This chapter develops further the implications of the thesis regarding aesthetics and design practice presented in the book, Overlooking the Visual (see output 1).

It examines the interpretative view of perception in terms of the relationships between the visual, aesthetics and design practice. The critical, conceptual basis of aesthetic responses and the role ideas and design have in shaping the quality of experience are explored. It cuts through, extrapolates and explains the complexity of the related philosophical ideas. The practical applications of these ideas are shown as are the lessons that can be learned from practice, rescuing aesthetics from its ivory tower.

Extending the pragmatic line of inquiry developed of James, Dewey and Rorty, this chapter presents the groundbreaking concept of aesthetic theory that does not depend on deep-seated psychological resonances, subconscious responses or the recognition of universal truths. For the first time, it presents a comprehensive argument for understanding aesthetic responses without the insertion of a sensory mode of thinking or other kinds of levels of understanding that supposedly lie beneath intelligence. Showing it to be entirely dependent on what we know, framed by concepts, language and therefore accessible, this entirely new approach, connects ideas, design practice with shaping the quality of experience. Uniquely and very much against the grain, it moves aesthetic theory out of continental and phenomenological debate, into the real world of materiality and ideas.

The chapter is in the book edited by Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell which brings together leading international scholars to assess all aspects of visual culture and is a handbook that provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the subject.