The book Is Landscape…? Essays on the Nature of Landscape, edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim, is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that addresses the fundamental question “What is landscape?” without offering a definitive answer. The structure of the book is organized around fourteen questions, with each chapter written by an author from fields such as philosophy, history, ecology, technology, and design. This question-driven approach, while opening up new horizons for critical thinking, also leads to conceptual dispersion and a lack of theoretical coherence among the chapters.

Moreover, by shifting from classical landscape urbanism discussions toward philosophical and cultural reflections, the book reconsiders the relationship between design, thought, and lived spatial experience. Chapters such as “Is Landscape Literature?” and “Is Landscape Philosophy?” demonstrate that landscape is not merely a physical objectivity, but a linguistic, temporal, and experiential realm through which the world is understood. Within the context of landscape architecture education in Iran, this work provides a theoretical foundation for moving from a skill-oriented approach to a thinking-oriented one, emphasizing that landscape is less a designed product than a way of thinking about space, culture, and time.