Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradiction in Landscape Architecture
According to this book's cover: "Unnatural Horizons presents a selective history of the last five centuries of landscape architecture, at the intersection of poetics and science, rhetoric and technology, philosophy and politics."  This is followed under the heading of 'praise' where no-doubt eminent critics congratulate it for being a revelation of landscape architecture, a beautiful pioneering work: freshness and boldness and writing strong and clear.  --Landscape DesignAllen S. Weiss has written a beautiful pioneering piece of work, which  unfolds, among other things, a thrilling account of how natural beauty  has been determined by our arts since the Renaissance. Each of the  chapters is documented by a wealth of philosophical and artistic  material, astutely brought into play and shown in its multifold  interrelationships....As ever, Weiss uses history in a fresh and  imaginative (and even subtly perverse!) manner so that Unnatural  Horizons, with its original iconography and the delightful music of its  language, sounds very much like a Gesamtkunstwerk in itself. It is,  indeed, a masterwork. --Professor Daniel Charles, University of Nice/Sophia AntipolisThis is a brilliant, almost hallucinatory, revelation of landscape  architecture--its profoundly metaphysical origins, its transfixing  history, and its virtually infinitizing future. The very term "garden"  has become so dramatically reconceived by Weiss that it seizes the agency  of transitivity itself--all the classical elements have been so  meticulously elaborated and so theoretically energized here as to bring  an entirely new dimension to our aesthetic experience. In his reflections  on landscape architecture, from the classical period, through the  baroque, to the modern and beyond, Weiss has raised our understanding of  the garden to an exponentially higher level. --Professor David B. Allison, State University of New York at Stony Brook