The seventh section confronts the role of aesthetics in the creation of various forms and tastes in environmental design. The popular as well as the ̉highÓ elements of taste and fashion influence the disciplines of landscape architecture and historic preservation.

26 hints at Martha Schwartz's borrowings from "high art" and her arguably facile applications to landscape design. Claiming an interdisciplinary influence, Schwartz seems to exhibit more of a wanna-be posturing in some of her work, imitating art and threatening to entangle landscape architecture in the intellectual and political economies of the gallery (a space S.A.L.A.D. currently employs, ironically enough, for its own agenda).

27 suggests a parallel operation in the popular work of the "Other Martha", Martha Stewart. Stewart's multimedia empire of domestic fashion and bliss mixes gardening, decorating, and cooking among other pursuits in an intertextual buffet. Consumption of the resulting cultural smorgasbord promises an unattainable suburban apotheosis. Reminiscent of Downing, good decorating can lead to a moral cleansing of the nation.

28 and 29 tie the aesthetic and cultural experimental project of modern aesthetics (evoked by the abstract and self-referential Mondrian "tree" painting) to the project of forward thinking social policy (evoked by the abstract and self-referential form suburbinization). Here the modernist cultural forces that led to a desire for a rational and purified aesthetic influence the modern landscape composition.