The Cultural Landscape Foundation Launches New Website to Complement The New American Garden Exhibition at the National Building Museum
Site include additional photography, videos, recollections and a gallery guide
Media Contact: Nord Wennerstrom | T: 202.483.0553 | M: 202.225.7076 | E: nord@tclf.org
Site includes additional photography, videos, recollections and a gallery guide
Washington, D.C. (October 19, 2015) – The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) has launched The New American Garden website to complement the traveling photographic exhibition The New American Garden: The Landscape Architecture of Oehme, van Sweden, on view at the National Building Museum through May 1, 2016. TCLF organized the exhibition, which chronicles the careers and influence of Wolfgang Oehme (1930-2011) and James van Sweden (1935-2013), and it is presented in collaboration with the museum. The two practitioners revolutionized landscape architecture with the creation of the New American Garden, a type of garden characterized by large swaths of grasses and fields of perennials, which van Sweden called “vigorous and audacious.” Their style celebrated the seasonal splendor of the American meadow while promoting its inherent ecological, sustainable, aesthetic, and ornamental qualities. The New American Garden is a project of TCLF’s Landslide program, which raises awareness about threatened and at-risk works of landscape architecture. Significant Oehme, van Sweden projects have already been lost and others are threatened, including Pershing Park on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC (designed by M. Paul Friedberg with a planting plan by Oehme, van Sweden).
The exhibition, the largest monographic landscape architecture exhibition in the Museum’s history, includes 52 contemporary and newly commissioned photographs of important residential, civic, and commercial projects. It coincides with the 25th anniversary of Bold Romantic Gardens, a widely influential 1990 book the two business partners wrote with Susan Rademacher, former executive director of the Louisville Olmsted Parks Conservancy, Inc., and currently the parks curator at the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, chronicling 21 projects that introduced the world to their horticulturally exuberant designs. The New American Garden website includes dozens of additional images of the featured projects; selections from a 2009 video oral history with van Sweden; recollections by friends, clients and colleagues about van Sweden; and the exhibition gallery guide (available as a free downloadable PDF and for sale as a print publication at TCLF’s website).
Oehme and van Sweden created their eponymous, Washington, D.C.-based firm in 1975 and quickly gained critical attention and praise for their work at the Federal Reserve Board Gardens (Washington, D.C.), the first public iteration of their signature style, and at the Water Mill, New York home of Alex and Carole Rosenberg. Their style sharply contrasted with the archetypal lawn-centric landscapes that dominated Postwar America. As van Sweden said in a 2008 Washingtonian interview: “[Our designs] did not feature lawn but tapestry-like plantings and perennials and masses of the same plant—3,000 black-eyed Susans instead of six.” Plants were the dominant and signature feature of their work, and they created gardens to be interesting in all four seasons.
The website and exhibition are divided into four sections: [1] significant early projects in Bold Romantic Gardens including the Rosenberg residence, the Slifka Beach House (Sagaponack, New York), the Vollmer Garden (Baltimore, Maryland), and the Federal Reserve Board Garden (Washington, D.C.); [2] Residential Gardens, showing projects in Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, Virginia, and elsewhere; [3] Civic and Commercial Gardens, including the national World War II Memorial, Chicago Botanic Garden, New York Botanical Garden, Forest Park (St. Louis, Missouri), Americana Manhasset (Manhasset, New York), and others; and [4] Legacy and Stewardship, focused on landscape architecture’s innate ephemerality (nine of the 21 gardens in Bold Romantic Gardens are lost), and challenges to extant projects, notably Pershing Park (Washington, D.C.), for which Oehme, van Sweden & Associates did the planting plan, and which could be demolished to make way for a national World War I Memorial.
James van Sweden grew up in a large Dutch community in Grand Rapids, Michigan, earned a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Michigan, and studied landscape architecture at Delft University of Technology in 1960. After three years in the Netherlands he returned to the U.S. Wolfgang Oehme, originally from Germany, studied landscape architecture at the University of Berlin, graduating in 1954. He moved to the U.S. in 1957 and worked for the Baltimore County Department of Parks and practiced independently before founding a partnership with James van Sweden in 1975.
In many of the projects illustrated in the exhibition, Oehme and van Sweden worked with other practitioners, including the three principals of the successor firm, OEHME, VAN SWEDEN │ OvS—Sheila Brady, Lisa Delplace, and Eric Groft—who continue their legacy.
About The Cultural Landscape Foundation
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), founded in 1998, is a non-profit foundation that provides people with the ability to see, understand and value landscape architecture, its practitioners, and our shared landscape legacy in the way many people have learned to do with buildings and their designers. Through its website, lectures, outreach and publishing, TCLF broadens the support and understanding for cultural landscapes nationwide to help safeguard our priceless heritage for future generations. TCLF makes a special effort to heighten the awareness of those who impact cultural landscapes, assist groups and organizations working to increase the appreciation and recognition of cultural landscapes, and develop educational tools for young people to better connect them to their cultural landscape environs.
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