Recovering Landscape. Essays in Contemporary Landscape Theory

This highly theoretical collection of essays is based partly on a symposium held at the Architectural Association in London in 1994. In his introduction, Corner (landscape architecture, Univ. of Pennsylvania) nicely frames the book with discussions of the semantics of the word landscape and its further cultural connotations while also describing how it is regarded by preservationists and represented in advertising. The volume is divided into three parts: reclaiming place and time, constructing and representing landscape, and urbanizing landscape. The breadth of approaches is impressive, and the contributors ably describe the idea of landscape from a virtually infinite set of perspectives, from the sense of tactility to the distinctive site characteristics of airports. Nevertheless, this is recommended only for graduate-level collections in cultural and architectural theory.