Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Mary C. Kingery-Page / Children are imaginative, creative, and active. Children of all age groups are influenced by their surroundings, particularly school-aged children (Frost, 2010). School-aged children’s physical, emotional, social, and intellectual developmental characteristics are influenced by their surrounding environments. Today, uniform playgrounds are diminishing the opportunities for youth to develop their personal creativity and imagination through play (Thompson 2007, Solomon 2005). By integrating art into playgrounds, these environments will offer children greater opportunity for developmental enrichment through their interactions with the site. Researched cases of art and play have inspired the development of a typology. The typology is a collection of quintessential ways that settings for play can be visually and experientially enriched by art. This process began with three critical questions; 1) What constitutes a playground? 2) What is art? and 3) How can art be integrated into playgrounds? More than 30 precedents that demonstrate art in a play setting were examined. Noting differences and similarities between the precedents, 12 types were identified. Next, analysis matrices identifying primary and, if applicable, secondary placement of each of the precedents in the 12 developed types, including sub-types, giving art in playgrounds a place. Also classified was type of art, high or vernacular, for each precedent. The research methodology was an iterative process of literature and precedent research followed by the distillation of types, further research, and refinement of the typology framework.

The following dissertation is an endeavor to put forward the conceptual background of Gadamer&rsquo / s assertion in Truth and Method that art has a truth value. This conceptual background includes many important concepts which are indispensable in understanding the assertion that art has a truth value. Second chapter is mainly concerned with Bildung and sensus communis. Bildung describes the nature of knowledge which flourishes in the character of the person and which changes that person by penetrating the personality of him. Sensus communis describes the relationship of truth with the power of persuasion and the power of making right choices in social life. Taste, on the other hand, not only accompanies us when we are fulfilling our most basic needs in life and also shows itself in all of our moral decisions. In that sense, a developed taste is very effective in directing us to the truth. The third chapter offers an analysis of Gadamer&rsquo / s critique of Kant&rsquo / s aesthetics revolving around the concepts of judgment, taste, genius and Erlebnis. For Gadamer, Kant has subjectivized aesthetics. This subjectivization has two sides. Firstly, Kant argues that the experience of beauty does not give us any knowledge about the beautiful object. That is to say, Kant insists that aesthetic experience does not contain any cognitive element, because he believes that the only source of truth and knowledge is science. Secondly subjectivization means that Kant reduced art and beauty only to the experience of it / he talks only about experience of beauty, not about work of art itself at all. The forth chapter introduces the ontology of the work of art which is elaborated mainly on concepts of play, representation, mimesis, total mediation, contemporaneity. When inquiring into the mode of being of play, Gadamer defends that the subject of the play is play itself and in the same way in the experience of art the subject is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work of art. In the last chapter history of hermeneutics is elaborated in order to find the proper place of Gadamer&rsquo / s constituting concepts in the general frame of hermeneutics.