Chapter One Summary
Teacher: Toby Day
Student: SYU, JIA-HAO
Words: 220
Chapter one is composed of author’s main idea; the image of the environment, then has been distinguished to two sections: Legibility and imagebility. Generally speaking, it is apparently that the majority of author’s theory is based on the visual quality of the American city. Under legibility consequence, cityscape could be patterned by citizen’s daily life experience. Especially in some modern cities with coherent urban planning, where every single road or alley is organized very logically when presenting on ground figure, and theoretically, totally lost in the city context sometimes could makes city more unpredictable, and more vivid. In other concern, imagebility, the ultimate spirit is hold here is according to that city is changeable through time from objective perspective – significant scales like the whole civilization, to subjective perspective – scale that more specific like an individual walking as a pedestrian with random rhythm on the sidewalk. The spread of such a vast metropolitan area could be all depends on how much relative citizens dig themselves in. The ever increasing of intelligent would be able to aware that what is next of both biological and cultural development by living as observer. No matter it is visual clarity or visual interconnection and whatsoever, designers are just forming the whole scene, which is identical for commons to structure its corresponding image in their minds. “ It is the total environment made visible.” (Langer, Suzanne, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art, 1953.)