The lens of landscape: ancient experience, and landscape as a way of seeing architecture

It appears tenable and historically valuable to understand the experience of landscape, and thus to discuss architecture in terms of landscape aesthetics. Archaic experience of landscape predates and underlies our experience of architecture; landscape appears to have framed aspects of human revolution. Appleton's prospect-refuge theory assumes an inherited biological basis for aesthetic response to landscape, and his theory establishes as a valid paradigm for reflection on architecture. Landscape, a discourse with potential to connect contemporary attitudes to archaic roots provides a paradigm for discussion of modern and recent architecture which engages with site and topography. Emotional response to environmental conditions, a once-vital survival necessity is argued as an underpinning of architectural aesthetics; a sense of beauty and satisfaction in selected architecture is seen as connected to landscape. Related to landscape aesthetics is able to present fresh insight into architecture.