TCLF Year in Review

Thanks to your support, in 2010 The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) achieved several major milestones, resulting in significant audience growth, valuable media coverage and attention for landscapes, landscape architecture, and practitioners.

Highlights include:

WOT tour at the Franciscan Monastery.First, we launched What’s Out There, the first-ever Wiki-based website about parks, gardens, and other designed landscapes that are publicly accessible. This database, fully searchable by site, designer name, style, type and/or locale, currently includes more than 650 landscapes and 380 designers—and will continue to expand as rapidly as funding is received.

What’s Out There (WOT) led to the inaugural What’s Out There Weekend in Washington, D.C., featuring two days of tours through 25 landscapes that attracted more than 1000 people. WOT also received a Design Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for our first state-level partnership (Maine). Working with the Maine Historical Society, we’ll add more than 200 sites. Thanks to the continuing support of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, WOT now has a full-time project manager, which will enable important university partnerships and 2011 What’s Out There Weekend events in San Francisco and Chicago.

In tandem with the publication of Shaping the American Landscape (University of Virginia Press), the most recent addition to our ongoing Pioneers of American Landscape Design series, TCLF convened lively, well-attended conferences at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Atlanta History Center and the Lyman Estate in Waltham, MA, owned by Historic New England. At each, the works of important regional practitioners were made visible as a way to interpret and thoughtfully steward their design legacies.

(top) Birnbaum presenting Stewardship Excellence Award to Crescent Real Estate Equities; (bottom) van Sweden Oral History homepage.

We also launched two new Pioneers oral histories. The first, with Lawrence Halprin, which took 6 years, was unveiled this past spring and made possible with generous support from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. In September, we premiered the James van Sweden oral history, made possible with support from the Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Foundation and the Pleasant T. Roland Foundation, before a standing room audience in Washington, D.C. Also in September, the series received the Award of Excellence in Communications—the highest honor from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Partnerships have always been essential to our mission. TCLF continued partnerships with the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), Garden Design magazine, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, Landscape Journal, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and established new ones with American Photo magazine, Preservation Dallas, Atlanta History Center, and American Forests.

 
(left) Cummer Oak; (right) Sunnylands forecourt.

Garden Design joins us for its fourth consecutive year on Landslide, our annual thematic compendium of endangered landscapes. This year’s theme, Every Tree Tells a Story, focuses on the irreplaceable trees and tree groupings that have shaped the development of communities and cultures in a dozen locations nationwide. A companion traveling photography exhibition, curated by American Photo (and extensively featured in their November/December 2010 edition) with generous support from The Davey Tree Expert Company, will open at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark. The exhibit will travel next spring to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s renowned Philadelphia Flower Show followed by LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, NY, where it will be paired with a specially commissioned outdoor exhibit.

We helped get Halprin sites in Springfield, MO, and Fort Worth, TX, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and provided technical assistance for Garrett Eckbo’s masterwork, Fulton Mall in Fresno, CA; Sunnylands, the estate of Walter and Leonore Annenberg in Palm Springs, CA, and Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, NY. Significantly, attention brought in by our conferences, Huffington Post entries and Facebook, twitter, and YouTube postings helped our website surge past 6 million hits with 600,000 unique visitors.

This tremendous growth reflects the need, now more than ever, to promote responsible stewardship decisions. Please respond by supporting our education and preservation initiatives for our irreplaceable landscape legacy—a legacy that you above all appreciate and enrich.