The term "landscape architecture" implies a peaceful coexistence of contradictory ideas: soft/hard low/high, outside/inside, ground/figure. Many contemporary theorists have been concerned with such dualisms: How do we reconcile mind and body, the mental and physical worlds? In his new book Unnatural Horizons Allen Weiss suggests that it is this very ‘paradoxical’ condition that can provide a blueprint far a new way of thinking about and mating landscape architecture, one that "escapes all formalist definition." Weiss appropriates the work of artists and sculptors such as Robert Smithson into his vision of landscape architecture and then creates a history for these "non-sites" - works that simultaneously disrupt and reveal the original site - through a series of five essays. The essays piece together evidence of “paradox and contradiction” from the periods of the Italian Renaissance to the French Enlightenment to early-nineteenth century American Transcendentalism. Weiss then deposits the reader back in 1968 into the arms of the revered Smithson, shamelessly concluding the with the artist’s own words. This new and improved history of landscape architecture, a redescription of historical gardens and landscapes through a language of heterogeneity, process, creativity, and temporality, is assembled from poetry, music, and even the culinary arts...