Shlomo Aronson: Making Peace with the Land is a good cause for celebration. The first book dedicated to the work of a single Israeli landscape architect, clearly the most deserving one, discloses a previously unknown body of significant work taking place in a complex and challenging context to a world-wide audience. Though the landscape of the Holy Land, a setting of Biblical histories and constant land conflicts, is well known to millions around the world through picture books and television coverage, the artistry of landscape architects whose works continue to shape the land of modern Israel has never before been appropriately acknowledged and covered.

Aronson's built landscapes harmoniously resonate with and reconcile the strenuous landscape; a landscape encumbered by millennia of cultural depositories, bestowed with sacredness, saturated with bloodshed, and suppressed by battles. Aronson's designs gently mend scars in the landscape, aesthetically site viewing platforms and weave paths, and craftfully knit built details and plants with contour lines, agricultural patterns, rock and human formations.

The book is a portfolio and a retrospect of Shlomo Aronson's landscape architecture practice of some thirty years. Twenty-seven projects grouped into seven types — urban, public parks, national parks and restoration, infrastructure, afforestation, town planning, and gesture interventions — are accompanied by three short texts of landscape architects who have known Aronson.

The Foreward by Lawrence Halprin, Aronson's mentor, collaborator, and friend, reiterates Shlomo's respect and awe for the landscapes he chose to work within — the sacred and open rather than the secular and built — that of Jerusalem rather than Tel Aviv. Peter Jacob's introduction to the book sketches Aronson as a master that "weds environmental and aesthetic literacy with both a pragmatic and symbolic reading of the landscape." Jacobs pinpoints Aronson's guiding tenet, a search for a sense of peace and quite. And finally, Kenny Helphand's insightful essay largely elaborates on this search for order and calmness in the chaotic and stressful Israeli landscape. According to Helphand, the key concern of Aronson's work is, when and how to introduce the modern as counterpoint or connective tissue. And while modern needs are well addressed in Aronson's work, the design language remains traditional.

Mira Engler is an associate professor in the department of landscape architecture at Iowa State University.