Utopias, Monsters and Paradise….

Weller highlights places iconic to our era and text on the amazon.com page for his book describes its contents well: “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.”
Richard Weller. 2024. To the Ends of the Earth: A Grand Tour for the 21st Century. Birkhauser; Basel, Switzerland.