In Aesthetics, Well-being and Health.
p. 241-248
Introduction by Birgit Cold
The essay by Perla Serfaty-Garzon “I Live in a Beautiful House, on a Beautiful Street in Beautiful Montreal: Notes on Well-being and the Experience of Place Aesthetics” tells a story about love of “Mediterranean beauty” as a home base from which she assesses, appraises and understands other places and herself. She succeeds in poetic terms to describe physical aspects of the environment, and she examines aesthetic qualities of times during the day and life, spoken words, and activities and people in different places related to her experience of well-being and beauty. Mediterranean beauty is especially precious and touching in arid areas and surprising when experienced in the North. It has personal roots in childhood and constitutes familiarity also related to other countries, clmates, places and people wilh respect to the awareness and appreciation of beauty.
Beauty becomes a phenomenon equally related to the atmosphere of places as to the person experiencing il. Bearing this in mind it is encouraging to read an essay writlen by an experienced researcher highlighting the essence of aesthetic awareness and multisensuous experiences as interacting, childhood-influenced, mood-inspired and social-related phenomena. It shows with great conviction the difficulty of performing reasonable research on separate, aesthetic matters, trying to isolate certain aspects of a total experience.
One way of making us more aware of these interactions is to ask people to tell their personal stories on aesthetic experiences or ask researcher to write essays as we do here.
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Reference:
Perla Serfaty-Garzon (2002) I Live in a Beautiful House, on a Beautiful Street in Beautiful Montreal: Notes on Well-being and the Experiences of Place Aesthetics. In Cold, B. (direction) Aesthetics, Well-being and Health. Essays within architecture and environmental aesthetics. Ethnoscapes, Ashgate (UK). p. 241-248. http://perlaserfaty.net/beautiful-house-street-in-montreal/
