Restorative Environment and Landscape Architecture

From the perspecive of landscape architecture, how to design an environment which can achieve the benefits of restorative is an important issue. Especially in the environment like hospital, health care, learning, office... There is a lot of research articles depicted the relationship between natural environment and attention restoration, stress release. These articles even pointing out the attributes of the benefits on psychological indicators like recovery, reflection and physiological indicators like heart rate, blood pressure, and brainwaves. However, from the perspective of landscape architecture, the planners and designers needs to how how to apply the research results into their projects and can produce the restorative effect in their works. therefore, how to depict the "environment" seems to be an critical theme for further studies. We need more studies to work on the environment side. Past researches have told us the nenefits of natural environment in comparisons to the urban or artificial environments. However, this is not good enough for landscape planners and designers to use on their pratical projects. Kaplan and Kaplan (ref.)tries to categories the features of the natural environment of being away, fascination, extent, and compatibility. It does give practice landscape architectures a guideline to follow. Researchers need to give criteria to designers of how to link the landscape elements, their composition, and configurations to these features to unravel the environment variables in the restorative environment.