ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the human wellbeing depends on successful integration between nature and architecture. It presents sketches from natural and built environments. The key concept of the chapter is environmental aesthetics. The chapter discusses research conducted within this field, examining environmental aesthetics and roots of aesthetic preferences. The book On the Aesthetics of Architecture is an excellent contribution to the discussion about the interaction between formal aesthetics and architectural properties and their perception, cognition and assessment. Empirical research has demonstrated that natural environments and natural elements have a positive effect on well-being as well as on health. Stephen Kaplan's model of cognitive preference was primarily developed to explain the evolutionary roots of aesthetic preferences. The suggestion that environmental beauty was discovered and interpreted by the eighteenth and nineteenth century artists, who created the basis for a common cultural and aesthetic perception and hence laid the foundations for developing knowledge about beauty in nature, is interesting.
