Environmental Experiences
The capability of a location to enhance environmental experience depends on the landscape and its potential to foster and create subjective interpretations among individuals. These places also are significant to visitors since it promotes education and other indirect effects. Recognizing the need for architecture is important for people to fully understand and feel the landscape experience.
The Tree Top Walk at the Valley of Giants in Australia “is a walkway that rises up to 38m above the forest. ” Visitors can be able to create the feeling of environment.
Visitors get a different perspective on the shapes, sounds and movement of the forest. The Oregon Paleo Lands Institute will help you discover Oregon’s past and explore its present landscapes. The place helps educate individuals and visitors of the wonders the place has to offer. Our mission is to help northwest residents and visitors of all ages to explore, understand, and enjoy the world-renowned natural history of north central Oregon, the ancient and living landscapes of Oregon’s last 400 million years, and the full fossil record of earth’s last 50 million years.
The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Texas seeks to inform individuals of the diverse native plants in the region. First as the National Wildflower Research Center and later as the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, this special place exists to introduce people to the beauty and diversity of wildflowers and other native plants. This is in response to the threats and the call for preservation of these plants. These places help enhance their experience of understanding landscape by how each one creates the feeling of satisfaction and cultivate the feeling of appreciation that contributes to the landscape experience.
It must be a mixture of both understanding and at the same time appreciation of his/her perceptive abilities. However, an individual must not only settle for what is observable. The visitor must create and conceptualize his/her own interpretation of the landscape. This image will bear some relationship to the way in which the individual responds to and structures his world as a result of his physical perceptual capacities, socio-economic, cultural, personality, experiential and other characteristics.
The three types of places mentioned give both direct and indirect experiences to the visitor. Looking at it, the area of indirect experiences is classified to be relative. An experience of an individual may vary depending on how each one perceives a landscape and associates it to personal experience. A person feeling can range from curiosity over the landscape to happiness and awe. There are varied reactions among people and this creates different reactions that cultivate experience. On the other hand, there are also direct experiences that the landscape contributes to a visitor.
These are (1) education, (2) environmental education and (3) interpretative centers. Education can be considered as one important contributions of landscape experience. It creates awareness that has been stimulated by the actuality of perceiving, analyzing and understanding the landscape. A visitor creates its connection with the landscape by the way it manifests itself to the viewer and in return how the person responds to it given the factors that revolve around the environment and the individual. Thus, this creates the process of education for each visitor.
Environmental education can also be seen as an outcome of landscape experience since the three examples that were given are primarily natural or ecological sites. Landscape experiences gives idea to visitors of the current situation of these sites. This experience creates awareness especially during this time that the call for environmental concern has been constantly increasing. Effective and meaningful environmental education is a challenge we must take seriously if we and future generations are to enjoy the benefits of our natural heritage.
Thus, landscape experiences creates an avenue for environmental education by showcasing visitors the beauty and wonder of these sites and how each one is responsible for its protection and continued sustenance. The last mentioned is landscape experience creates interpretative centers. Landscape experience gives opportunities for interpretative centers to provide adequate information regarding the site. Also, interpretative centers provide cultivate interests of volunteers and organizations to further promote the site. Architecture plays an important role in landscape experience.
People who have background in the topic understand that its facets are diversified. To fully appreciate architecture, students need to deconstruct its meaning from a variety of perspectives: artistic, social, and scientific. Architecture serves as a guide for visitors to engage in their local landscape. The idea is that each individual seeks find meaning and experience in the landscape however this cannot be done without an understanding architecture. Another is that architecture’ diversity and varied perspectives paves the way for an increased landscape experience among visitors.
Different meanings and interpretations are derived from these sites that foster deeper learning experiences. There are many variants and factors that determine the landscape experience of an individual. The capability of an individual to associate the landscape with an understanding of architecture and different subjective interests’ can create a meaningful and worthwhile experience. The full appreciation of the environment experience again is achieved if a learning process is obtained by the individual upon exposure to the landscape.
