Too often, design competitions and signature architecture result in costly eyesores that do not work. How can sponsors and clients get more meaningful results? To answer this question, Dr. Nasar, supported by riveting studies of competitions and Peter Eisenman's competition-winning design for the Wexner Center at the Ohio State University, suggests the use of pre-jury evaluation (PJE). He shows the potential value of this approach as well as visual quality programming for many kinds of environmental design for which the client wants to convey certain desirable meaning. The studies, from those...

How do people react to the visual character of their surroundings? What can planners do to improve the aesthetic quality of these surroundings? Too often in environmental design, visual quality--aesthetics--is misunderstood as only a minor concern, dependent on volatile taste and thus undefinable. Yet a substantial body of research indicates the importance of visual quality in the environment to the public and has uncovered systematic patterns of human response to visual attributes of the built environment. Efforts to understand environmental aesthetics have been undertaken by investigators...

This volume builds on the work of Kevin Lynch, whose key 1960 work The Image of the City transformed the way design professionals and social scientists deal with urban form and design.

The author explores further the role of human evaluations of the cityscape, and describes how to assess, plan and design the appearance of cities to please the inhabitants. He presents a series of studies on evaluative images, discusses methodologies, findings and applications to design and planning at various stages.