Coming In To View: Explorations of radical shifts in beauty outdoors

Our personal appreciation of landscapes encompasses all those places we may have touched, visited, or seen.

Inevitably, a radical shift in our notions of beauty in the outdoors is underway across all types, from inner city to wilderness. Landscapes confront and influence our physiological, psychological, and aesthetic relationship with the natural world. We question what we see.

This book's narrative arc of 17 separate essays travels through landscapes from the National Mall in Washington DC to the remote highlands of Mongolia. Uncovering the strains and indications of change in what we now experience outdoors, anywhere, everywhere, whether familiar or unfamiliar, these essays seek to open our eyes to new prospects of landscape appreciation.

Coming In To View welcomes the reader to imagine the actions and coalitions necessary to create their own landscapes of liberty for a more than human world.

- Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA

Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture, UVA School of Architecture

Coming In To View is a book to linger with rather than rush through, inviting reflection on change-both societal and environmental-through lenses of beauty, climate, and freedom.

- Moura Quayle

Professor Emerita, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, The University of British Columbia

Coming In To View is a thoughtful and extensive exploration of personal perspectives on a diverse set of landscapes ranging from the Washington Mall in DC to the wide steppes of Mongolia.

- Noel Corkery

Founding Director, Landscape Foundation of Australia Ltd.

Roger Courtenay invites us to redefine our relationship to the world by questioning our internal biases regarding our connections to place, the principle of freedom of movement, and a reappraisal of how we value and define beauty.

- Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR

Founding President and CEO, The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Roger Courtenay is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. His practice has focused on public works in the urban design and historic preservation spheres, across the USA, Canada, and overseas. A life of international travel, backpacking, hiking, whitewater canoeing, riding, and skiing have afforded access to a range of remote-to-urban landscapes in countries around the world and underwritten a wide appreciation and investigation of landscapes vernacular and designed. For the last eighteen years he has also been busy at rewilding the small family farm in the rural Piedmont of Virginia.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Northern Forest Publishing
Published: 05/01/2026
ISBN: 9781997596288
Pages: 314
Weight: 1.89lbs
Size: 9.00h x 7.00w x 1.00d