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CHOICE Review

Solomon had a distinguished career as a graphic artist before turning to architecture and landscape design. She has an architect's sensibility for a world ordered by geometry and line, for clearly defined spaces and volumes, but her work also reflects the visual artist's fascination with the ambiguous and subjective--the environment as a collage of sensory experience. This book uses color photographs and drawings of both real and imaginary designed landscapes to illustrate a text that proposes a typology based on three major historic traditions--the formal, the picturesque, and the agrarian. The journal-like narrative combines a sampling of detailed historical information (even the days and hours when some sites are open to the public) with poetic and discursive commentary, much of it drawn from a small body of scholarly writing on garden history. Solomon argues for the relevancy of formal/agrarian aesthetic traditions to contemporary urban design. The book is more useful as documentation of an individual artist's exploration of landscape form and imagery than for its contribution to landscape history or criticism. C. M. Howett University of Georgia