1. Introduction
People are affected by the aesthetics of nature, landscapes, and architecture [
1,
2,
3,
4]. Different landscape characteristics influence people’s attitudes, and eventually translate to the landscape experience and aesthetic pleasure [
5]. As a distinctive branch of the world’s landscape family and excellent carriers of East Asian cultures, Chinese Classical Gardens (CCGs) encapsulate advantages of sustainability, ecological value, urban function, pleasure, and healthcare [
6]. Among these benefits, the landscape aesthetics of CCGs have been extensively recognized as important attributes to evaluate their overall quality [
7], although empirical studies on this issue with quantitative methods are still in a lack.
Aesthetic pleasure involves comprehensive judgments in a complex process that includes perception, interpretation, and appraisal [
8]. It was suggested to assess landscape aesthetics from a formal perspective, which was regarded as the sensate appreciation of the physical attributes in the visual world (e.g., volume, order, and richness) [
9,
10,
11]. For landscape studies, there has been persistent accentuation of investigating the visual properties when assessing the aesthetic value of a landscape work [
12,
13,
14]. For instance, plants are often regarded as one of the most important components that influence people’s perception of landscapes among these visual elements [
15,
16]. The scenic beauty estimation methods that rely largely on the photos prepared by researchers were well used to evaluate aesthetic values [
17,
18]. Nine visual concepts, i.e., naturalness, complexity, coherence, and historicity, were identified trying to characterize landscape aesthetics [
19]. However, such framework was developed mainly for the landscape assessment rather than for analyzing correlations between these visual concepts and landscape aesthetics. To our best knowledge, attempts of validation with such framework have been scarcely reported. The weights of different visual concepts contributing to landscape pleasure have been neither clarified yet.
Moreover, although previous studies on CCGs have been explored on space qualities [
20,
21], configurations [
22,
23], and visual aspects [
24,
25,
26], whereas similar empirical studies integrating people’s perceptive attitudes have not been fully addressed in the literature and seldom applied to a CCG case. During the last two decades, Western countries gradually reached a consensus that landscape could be defined as "an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors" [
27], highlighting the important role of perceptive attributes to shape a landscape with specific aesthetic characters [
28]. Therefore, more attempts are needed to incorporate broader concepts of emotion or experience to address relevant humanity aspects in landscape appreciation [
29,
30]. Accordingly, whether there are undetected human perceptions embodied in landscape aesthetics, if so, how aesthetic pleasure is associated with them, and how CCGs can be evaluated in terms of these perceived dimensions, are interesting but unsolved issues that need to be explored in this research.
Empirically, we hypothesize that aesthetic pleasure is a multidimensional concept that simultaneously embodies a series of potential perceptions. We also hypothesize that these perceived dimensions in turn affect aesthetic pleasure (
Figure 1). To fill in these knowledge gaps, this paper aimed to deepen the psychological understanding of what perceived dimensions emerge when tourists appreciate CCGs, and in turn, how these dimensions affect aesthetic pleasure. In previous studies, component-based analyses have been used to associate landscape attributes with aesthetic preference quantitatively but occasionally yielded controversial arguments [
31]. However, our study combined the factor analysis with multiple-regression can overcome such problem [
31].
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 provides a brief literature review.
Section 3 introduces the background of the selected case, general methods involved in this study, and the analysis procedures.
Section 4 develops the measurement instruments to generate the explorative dimensions.
Section 5 presents a series of interrelated and consequential analyses to validate the proposed dimensions.
Section 6 establishes regression models to align aesthetic pleasure with the proposed dimensions.
Section 7 summarizes the main findings of this paper with discussions and implications.
Section 8 concludes the article with some possible limitations.
3. Description of the Case Study
Located in the northwest quarter of Suzhou City in Jiangsu Province, China, the Liu-Yuan Garden was initially built during the Ming Dynasty (approximately 1593 AD) as a large private residence and was expanded and restored during the Qing Dynasty. At present, the Liu-Yuan Garden covers an area of approximately 2.33 ha and is open to the public as a garden museum. It is one of the most important representatives of CCGs, and it has been listed as a national cultural relic of China since 1961 and as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997. We selected the Liu-Yuan Garden as an example to explore what perceived dimensions might emerge and whether these psychological perceptions would shed on aesthetic pleasure.
The layout of Liu-Yuan Garden can be divided into five independent zones with thematic characteristics: the southern zone connecting to an intricate entrance gallery; the central zone featuring an open space and waterscape; the eastern zone serving as living courtyards, the northern zone featuring rockery works and caves; and the western zone, which is dedicated to an idyllic lifestyle. In addition, the spaces interact and penetrate across different zones (
Figure 2). Furthermore, walls further subdivide these five parts into many subsidiary gardens and courtyards. In this garden, buildings only account for 15% of the total area, whereas other landscape elements such as buildings, vegetation, landform, rockery works and caves, waters, and so on comprise its majority and are systematically organized along well-designed scenery locations to enhance visual effects and the space experience via transition, convergence, and contrast.
6. Discussion
Liveliness and exquisiteness primarily represent people’s reactions to the visual aspects of the landscape environment on the material level, whereas hedonic value and placeness reflect people’s reactions to the experiential aspects of the higher demands on the mental level. The current findings imply that the multidimensional characters of aesthetic pleasure are hierarchically linked. The results suggest that “placeness” is the most important dimension for the aesthetic appreciation of CCGs among the four selected dimensions. Stronger feelings of being attached to a place evoked higher levels of aesthetic appreciation. In the context of Chinese society, the attachment toward a CCG has been nourished through the enduring processes among didactical, social, cultural, psychological, and environmental interactions [
52]. This result validates the argument that a sense of belonging and the feeling of rootedness inherited from previous generations might cause a certain degree of apriority to aesthetic appreciation [
53]. The current findings are similar to Navin’s study [
54], which indicated that the yearning for a certain lifestyle is natural and can generate a biased preference in aesthetic appraisal, and the importance of “placeness” establishes effective bonds between people and the garden. For the future study of the aesthetics of CCGs, more attention should be paid to the concept of place, which seems to be a critical component not only because of its high influence but also because of its broad association with other perceived dimensions.
The dimension of exquisiteness plays a role similar to what Nasar referred to as “visual richness” [
55] or "complexity" [
19,
56], both of which are reported for their contributions to increasing arousal during the appreciation process. The influence of exquisiteness to aesthetic pleasure might also be justified in other fields because this finding is consistent, with some studies showing that moderate-to-high levels of complexity in a scene contribute to increased aesthetic appraisal [
15,
16,
57]. Exquisiteness reflects the overall design quality of a CCG, which is often constrained by its small size given that most were built in the old city center [
58]. Within this limited space, the humanmade environment is deliberately shaped with small buildings, galleries, pavilions, and terraces to fit natural elements such as trees, vegetation, water, and stones, creating scenery layers with visual richness (
Figure 5). These landscape elements are ingeniously decorated with carefully designed details such as windows, grills, screens, railings, and walls, which increase the sense of exquisiteness in the garden. On the other hand, the hedonic tone of feelings strengthens the aesthetic value of a CCG, as is implied through the design strategies that respond to people’s physiological needs by providing comfortable and convenient recreational facilities such as green shade, corridors, pathways, stools, and backrests. These landscape elements (e.g., curved bridges, rockery works, caves, and courtyards) are connected into a series of views (
Figure 5) that translate into the space montage of so-called “varying sceneries with changing view-points [
59,
60]. In this way, the temporal and spatial dimension is extended when people slowly wander into the garden for relaxation [
61]. Coincidently, our findings echo the literati’s intention of building such a garden because they intended to keep a distance from the chaotic society at that time and created a peaceful living place with spiritual freedom beyond the limits of immediate reality [
6]. According to the results, we revealed the consistency between the design intention and the actual effect of the experience in the garden [
20].
Thus far, the literature has discussed the organic nature or naturalness [
19,
44,
62] which encapsulates the notion of “liveliness”, which Alexander (2002) highlighted to explain the unique quality of inhering both the natural and humanmade environments and even throughout the universe [
63]. Although the result showed that liveliness significantly influences aesthetic pleasure, as is consistent with Sevenant’s study [
28], it only exerts a subordinate contribution to aesthetic pleasure compared with the other three dimensions. As the perception of liveliness transcends our daily experience, we might use it without conscious awareness. Or maybe liveliness is of a higher level of perception that could emerge only when basic dimensions such as placeness and hedonic value are fulfilled. Furthermore, because the results showed a significant correlation between liveliness and the other three described dimensions, liveliness might indirectly affect aesthetic pleasure through the mediating effect of the other dimensions. Regardless, these interesting hypotheses are beyond the scope of the current paper and should be examined in future studies.
8. Limitations
This explorative work attempted to contribute to the landscape aesthetic theory. More work is pending to provide additional support to the initial findings from different perspectives, diminish possible limitations, and facilitate other researchers to produce more generalized discoveries in the future. In this explorative study, we aimed to infer the attitudes of the young population by investigating universities students. For the future study, the sample size should be enlarged to other populations. Also, as behavior and attitude attributes are more significant determinants of aesthetic preference compared with the socio-demographic characteristics (Sevenant and Antrop, 2009), some control variables (e.g., education, social status, region, culture, and background) were purposely put aside because we sought to explore potential psychological structure in this pilot study for inspiration; however, more works should be carried on to investigate and validate these confounds to have more precise results. It might also be helpful to include other variables to increase the explanatory power of the proposed model. Furthermore, additional gardens of different types should be tested for comparison to examine the initial findings in a broader sense. Lastly, this research might contribute to our knowledge in the field of landscape studies, inspire better comprehension of the study of CCGs, and stimulate ideas for corresponding design practice.