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Leonardo, Vol. 10. pp. 131-132. Pergamon Press 1977. Printed in Great Britain REPORT ON THE URBAN AESTHETICS SESSIONS AT THE 1976 MEETING OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR AESTHETICS Arnold Berleant* and Marcus Hester** The 34th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), which was held in Toronto from 27-30 October 1976,had sessionsdevoted to various aspects of urban aesthetics. The first, entitled ‘Architecture, the City, and Society’, offered two papers, both of which showed how architecture is related to the dominant culture of the times. Remy Saisselinspoke on The Earthly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophes: From Dream to Nightmare. He described the critique of Paris by Mercier in the guise of a futuristic dream city of a new Paris of the year 2440, the speculations on the origin of architecture by Vie1 de Saint-Maux and the plans for an idealcity by Ledoux, which transformed Mercier’sdream intoa harmony of man and nature. Ledoux’s physiocratic city, however,was based on productive labor and capital and, despite its columns and other architectural allusions to the Greco-Roman past, it gave central importance to property and was actually a factory town that, because of its complete rationality, had become a nightmare. In his paper Architecture Is a Popular Art, Dennis Alan Mann saw architecture in modern pluralistic society as moving away from traditional high art principles of the hierarchically structured societiesof the past. Form now isconcerned not only with sculptural effects,principlesof proportion, symmetry and balance and with the expression of function; it becomes the result of their interaction with mind, thus emerging as meaning. Function becomes adaptability to various different uses, responsiveness and consistency, and economics is not concerned with low price but with availability in a consumer society.Thus architecture must respond to the aesthetic needs of its users and in a mass culture this means popular architecture. In a session on ‘Aesthetics and the Urban Environment ’, Donald Appleyard spoke on Aesthetics vs. Symbolismin Environmental Planning. He illustrated the observation that people in a city come to see new buildings as social symbols, criticizing architecture that does not reflect their own values as foreign intrusions. There is a striking difference between how people view their own environments and how they view the environments of others. The home environment seems governed by an aesthetics of familiarity, such that the neighborhood is noticed and becomes defined when it is threatened from outside. Thus local environments are *Aesthetician, C.W. Post Center, Long Island University, **Aesthetician, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, Greenvale,NY 11548, U.S.A. NY 27109, U.S.A. (Received 5 Dec. 1976.) dense with social meaning, while distant environments, such asthe natural landscape and exotic or utopian places that belong to other classes, have no such density of meaning. The aesthetic attitudethen becomesa means of socialcontrol in which social realities are screenedout, as when planners do not show minority groups in their illustrations. Barclay G. Jones dealt with the theme of Perception of the Past: Uses of Archaic Elements for Aesthetic Effect. Contrasting the accretionary process of city building with cities created by fiat, he favored the evolutionary process of development. This makes the city a collection of works of many minds over a wide span of time, rather than the work of a single person. Thus the aesthetic impact of the building stock of the city becomes a temporal melange in which the past confronts one in many ways. The great city, then, is a storehouse of the works of many creators. The need for roots and the craving of identity that the evolutionary city supplies is not fully appreciated, nor is it known why this is stronger at some times than at others, or why some things are identified as important at some times and not at others. Archaic elements, then, are an inevitable factor in the urban environment and how they are used reveals the attitudeof a culture. Thesespacesdevelopedover timeare the richest and most rewarding in the urban environment and it is importantto learn more about how perception of the past occurs. The remarks of these speakers were related to the planning of central Toronto by Ron Soskolne, a chief...

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