2024 Year in Review
With you as our champion and generous supporter, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) ushered in its second 25 years with an exceptional record of accomplishments. TCLF uniquely provides engaging content and essential historical context about our shared cultural landscape legacy, all free of charge. Moreover, global recognition for the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, named the world’s “top honor in the field of landscape architecture” by Fast Company, grows.
The most recent Oberlander Prize winner, Kongjian Yu, pioneer of the “sponge cities” concept for addressing climate change accelerated urban flooding that has revolutionized the field of landscape architecture, continues to generate interest globally. This year’s major flooding events in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, which repeatedly made global headlines, underscore the importance of Kongjian Yu’s work and landscape architecture’s leading role internationally in addressing the existential threat posed by climate change. Yu and his work were featured in two Oberlander Prize Forums in 2024 and will serve as a thematic structure for the forthcoming TCLF-organized international conference in 2025 (generously supported by PlayCore).
TCLF “lives and breathes” online and the website continues to flourish. The number of landscape entries in the What’s Out There database now surpasses 2,700 and includes nearly 1,100 Pioneers, and 14,000 images; TCLF’s 25th digital guide, the What’s Out There Guide to African American Cultural Landscapes, launched this year with some 150 sites and critical support from the National Endowment for the Arts (and recognition with an ASLA 2024 National Honor Award in Communications); existing digital guides for Baltimore, Nashville, Richmond, and the Twin Cities continue to grow, and the New York City guide now surpasses 135 sites and more than 100 related pioneers.TCLF’s YouTube channel now hosts more than 800 videos; and the Pioneers Oral Histories now number nineteen, with the addition of one about Canadian landscape architect Claude Cormier this June.
TCLF’s Garden Dialogues, in its twelfth season, featured more than a dozen exceptional residences throughout the country, and a What’s Out There Weekend took place in Baltimore, MD, with some 1,000 registered to attend. Major excursions included sold out daylong tours of Chicago-area projects by the landscape architecture firm Hoerr Schaudt, and Oak Spring, the Upperville, VA home of Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon; this year’s sold-out international excursion focused on culturally significant gardens and heritage sites in Normandy, France.
TCLF’s The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley photographic exhibition was hosted at two metro-New York City locations: ABC Stone in Brooklyn, and then Bell Works in Holmdel, N.J. where it remains on view until November 30. The exhibition at the former received prominent coverage in ArchDaily (U.S., Brazil, and Mexico), D5 Design Magazine (Switzerland), SURFACE, Architectural Record, Architect’s Newspaper, News24 (France), La Gaceta de Arucas (Spain), and other outlets.
Ongoing advocacy efforts for at-risk sites range from significant African American cultural landscapes to environmental art and significant works of landscape architecture. While progress is being made on behalf of Richmond, VA’s Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground, the key threat, high speed rail through the site, remains; by contrast Dabney Hill, a Texas Freedom Colony in Burleson County, TX featured in Landslide 2021: Race and Space, received a significant grant for rehabilitation work. Greenwood Pond: Double Site, an environmental sculpture by Land Art Movement leader Mary Miss commissioned for the Des Moines Art Center’s permanent collection, is in the courts and facing demolition; the Center’s relatively new director has ignored more than 50 letters urging for the site’s rehabilitation. Athena Tacha’s Green Acres in Trenton, N.J., included in Landslide 2014: Art and the Landscape, has finally been rehabilitated, and Nashville, TN’s Fort Negley Park is about to undergo the first phase of a $50 million rehabilitation. Myriad ongoing efforts addressed threats to Plaquemine Point, Sunshine, LA; Sunset Magazine headquarters, Menlo Park, CA; Mitchell Park Domes, Milwaukee, WI; Freeway Park, Seattle, WA; and many others.
The annual thematic Landslide report and exhibition, which normally focuses on threatened and at-risk landscapes, instead drew attention to those sites that served as stages for public protests and dissent. Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds includes the site of one of the largest slave rebellions in U.S. history; two protests in New York City that contributed to the downfall of the city’s noted parks commissioner, Robert Moses; an early site of annual national gay rights protests; campuses where student uprisings forced policy and leadership changes; and many others. Taken together, the stories and the people behind these protests risk being erased from our memory absent greater on-site and online interpretation.
TCLF’s President, Charles A. Birnbaum, is providing ongoing technical assistance for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y., N.Y. Cheekwood Estate and Garden, Nashville, TN; The Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Innisfree, Millbrook, N.Y.; The F.D.R. Memorial, Washington, D.C.; Franklin Park, Boston, MA; Colonial Williamsburg, VA; Live Oak Plantation, Weyanoke, LA; along with project reviews for several landscape architecture practices. Birnbaum currently serves as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he teaches the seminar, “Why Not Cultural Systems.”
Media coverage has been dominated by Oberlander Prize laureate Kongjan Yu, including in the New York Times, Financial Times, CNN, and several hundred other print and online outlets internationally. The What’s Out There Guide to African American Cultural Landscapes was featured in SURFACE, World Landscape Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and myriad local media for several sites in the guide. Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds included features in the New York Times and Architect's Newspaper.
Another major generator of media coverage continues to be the threat to Greenwood Pond: Double Site. Features included the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, SURFACE, Hyperallergic, Art Newspaper, Artforum, Architect’s Newspaper, ARTnews, artnet, Smithsonian, along with two Associated Press articles that each ran in more than 300 outlets, and international coverage in China, France, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.
This past year would not have been possible without the support of TCLF’s Season of Events Sponsors ABC Stone, Bartlett Tree Experts, GameTime, Summerhill Landscapes, and Victor Stanley; as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Society of Landscape Architects. Most critically, TCLF’s mission of “connecting people to places” via numerous educational and advocacy initiatives would not be possible without your sustained support, commitment, and generosity. Thank you.