Dieter Kienast (1945-1998) is a key Swiss figure in European landscape architecture. Amidst a striking change in societal understandings of nature, he sought a synthesis between design and ecology in the 1970s. He designed spaces to make the dissolving opposition between city and countryside legible and to enable aesthetic experience to help cope with increasingly complex everyday life. As a designer, planner, researcher and university lecturer, Kienast introduced new challenges into the discussion of those fields. Critique of urban planning, processes of participation and the significance of spontaneous urban vegetation played just as much a role in these discussions as did art, literature, architecture and the popularity of postmodernism. Anette Freytags award-winning book, which offers the first and comprehensive critical examination of Dieter Kienast, is now available to an international audience in this English edition. It not only vividly deconstructs how design, theory and representation are interwoven in Kienasts work, but also sheds light on a specific period of landscape architecture.

Anette Freytag ist Professorin für Landschaftsarchitektur an der Rutgers University, New Jersey. Die Architektur- und Landschaftshistorikerin forscht zur Kritik der zeitgenössischen Stadt- und Landschaftsentwicklung sowie zu architektonischen Ensembles des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.