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The book takes the reader on an intellectual adventure through a carefully curated selection of 120 places that can be understood as metaphors of contemporary global culture. Spread across all seven continents, from the depths of the ocean to outer space, these places are divided into six chapters: Paradises, Utopias, Machines, Monsters, Ruins, and Instruments.
The spectrum ranges from Steve Jobs' Apple Park in California to a national park in Costa Rica, a small field station for the protection of wild orangutans in Borneo, the Great Green Wall in Central Africa, the Trump resort Mar-a-Lago, to the border wall between Israel and Palestine. This book is a grand tour of the most pertinent places in the world today.
Richard Weller was professor and former chair of landscape architecture and urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, where he (together with Fritz Steiner) established the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. He was co-founder (with Tatum Hands) and former creative director of LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, founding director (with Vladimir Sitta) of Australian design firm Room 4.1.3., and holds adjunct professorships at the University of Western Australia and the University of New South Wales. His work has been frequently awarded in international design competitions and exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Venice and Rotterdam Biennales, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the MAXXI Gallery in Rome, the Canadian Design Museum in Toronto, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His publications include Room 4.1.3: Innovations in Landscape Architecture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City (University of Western Australia Press, 2009), Made in Australia: The Future of Australian Cities (UWAP, 2013), Transects (ORO Editions, 2014), Design with Nature Now (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2019), Beautiful China: Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China (ORO Editions, 2020), The Landscape Project (AR+D Publishing, 2022), and An Art of Instrumentality (ORO Editions, 2023). ‘The Atlas for the End of the World,’ Weller’s recent research work on biodiversity and cities, has been published in National Geographic and Scientific American, while his related research and design project to establish a ‘World Park’ is currently being considered for implementation by UNESCO.