Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture

Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture by Weiss, Allen S.. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9781568981390.

Unnatural Horizons presents a selective history of the last five centuries of landscape architecture at the intersection of poetics and science, rhetoric and technology, and philosophy and politics. It investigates the relations between garden aesthetics and metaphysics, discussing issues similar to those raised by Weisss critically acclaimed Mirrors of Infinity. The Western garden has always served as a setting for music, dance, theater, sculpture, and architecture, as well as the minor arts of meditative contemplation and erotic seduction. The history of landscape architecture is therefore inextricable from the histories of the other arts, and must be studied from an interdisciplinary and polycultural point of view. Some of the topics included in this book are the influence of neo-Platonic philosophy on the Italian Renaissance garden, erotic fantasies and the 18th- century libertine garden, the contrast between Thoreaus romantic notion of virgin nature and changes in perception due to increasing speed and mechanization, and the limits of landscape architecture as art form in 20th- century gardens. Weiss is the author of nine and editor of fourteen books on landscape architecture, cinema, comparative literature, and cuisine.