San Antonio Mayor Taylor and former Houston Mayor Parker to Participate in Leading with Landscape II: The Houston Transformation Conference March 11, 2016
Media Contact: Nord Wennerstrom | T: 202.483.0553 | M: 202.225.7076 | E: nord@tclf.org
San Antonio Mayor Ivy R. Taylor and former Houston Mayor Annise Parker to provide remarks and analysis on 21st-century city planning
Washington, DC (February 23, 2016) – The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) today announced that Ivy R. Taylor, Mayor of San Antonio, and former Houston mayor Annise Parker will participate in Leading with Landscape II: The Houston Transformation, a conference to be held Friday, March 11, 2016 at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Brown Auditorium. Houston is the center of ambitious, internationally significant landscape architecture-led projects that skillfully interweave design, ecology, environmental concerns, and culture, and the conference will feature leaders in multiple disciplines who will present projects and provide analysis. Internationally, landscape architecture has become a leader in defining and redefining urban space—from individual projects like New York City’s High Line to large-scale city planning in places like Toronto’s waterfront.
The conference is composed of three panels: The first two panels will examine work done to date and then work in the planning phases and/or under consruction, assessing the influences of culture, history, and ecology in the evolving Houston cityscape. Mayor Taylor and Ms. Parker will participate in the final panel, which will provide a comprehensive appraisal of the projects and issues presented and assess their implications for city-shaping.
“In a career that includes working for the City of San Antonio, serving as a member of the City Council, as mayor, and also as an executive at Merced Housing Texas, Mayor Taylor has been a leader in facilitating inner-city redevelopment and affordable housing and in targeting investment in areas where opportunities have been limited,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF’s president & CEO. "We are grateful for her participation and look forward to her input, ideas, and analysis,” he added.
"We are also honored to have former Houston mayor Annise Parker, who was the catalyst for much of the impressive and influential work that was done, and that continues to take place, in Houston. Mayor Taylor and Ms. Parker, along with a number of other distinguished participants, will no doubt give us an informative and energizing capstone conversation during the day's final panel," Birnbaum said.
Mayor Taylor said: “I’m interested in how equity, access and design impact the creation of outstanding public places and why elected officials need to participate in or even lead these conversations in order to improve the vitality and competitiveness of their communities.”
Following the conference, What’s Out There Weekend Houston, March 12-13, will offer free, expert-led tours of approximately 30 sites, including historic parks and projects currently underway. A What's Out There Houston guidebook to the city’s designed landscape legacy will be published.
Houston’s Designed Landscape Legacy in Brief
Houston’s highly urbanized landscape, encircled and traversed by ribbons of highways, is comprised of parks, university campuses, suburbs, and public open spaces spanning the Picturesque, Beaux-Arts, and Modernist styles amidst dense residential, commercial, and industrial enclaves. The city’s first comprehensive plan was developed by Massachusetts-based landscape architect Arthur Comey in 1913. Three years later, the Houston Parks and Recreation Department was created to provide oversight for two parcels—the 20-acre Sam Houston Park, founded in 1889, and the 285-acre Hermann Park, donated to the City in 1914. A century later, the Houston Parks and Recreation Department now manages a network of parks and open spaces comprising more than 23,000 acres, including a portfolio of high-profile, recently completed projects and numerous others underway. The conference will illuminate the historical and ecological foundations of many of Houston’s public open spaces while delving into the role that these new public landscapes could play in shaping Houston’s future.
The Conference in Perspective
Over the past fifteen years, TCLF has organized numerous conferences that examine urban planning and landscape architecture. Two recent conferences, Second Wave of Modernism III: Leading with Landscape (Toronto) and Bridging the Nature-Culture Divide III: Saving Nature in a Humanized World (San Francisco), have taken multidisciplinary approaches to understanding the balance that exists between the stewardship of natural and cultural resources and the evolving identities of urban areas. Conference attendees include landscape architects and allied practitioners, urban planners and related municipal officials, stewardship advocates, educators, and other interested parties.
“Houston's exceptional parks have been made possible by great landscape architects, visionary civic leaders, generous philanthropists and ardent citizen supporters,” said Joe Turner, Director of Houston Parks and Recreation Department. “We look forward to sharing our rich legacy and planning insights with a broad national audience."
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. 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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