What’s Out There Weekend Austin November 21-22 Features Free, Expert-Led Tours of Austin’s Landscapes, Parks, and Open Spaces

Washington, D.C. (October 21, 2015) – The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announces What’s Out There Weekend Austin, November 21-22, 2015 featuring more than two-dozen free, expert-led tours of Austin’s most significant landscapes. These tours enable people to discover the design history of places they may pass every day but don’t necessarily know about. Expert guides provide rich stories, personal anecdotes, and keen observations about each site, landscape architecture, city shaping, and garden design. The event is presented in association with local and national partners, with generous support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts – Art Works program, City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department, ASLA Texas, Bartlett Tree Experts, Design Workshop and Preservation Austin. All of the tours are free, but registration is required and capacity is limited. 

The tours, led by landscape architects, historians, academics, and park managers, will feature these sites: 

·      Austin City Hall and Public Plaza 

·      Austin Water Center for Environmental Research at Hornsby Bend 

·      Barton Springs 

·      Commodore Perry Estate 

·      Deep Eddy Bathhouse Pool 

·      Elisabet Ney Museum 

·      French Legation Museum 

·      Hyde Park 

·      Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center 

·      Laguna Gloria 

·      Lions Municipal Golf Course 

·      Mayfield Park and Preserve 

·      McKinney Falls State Park 

·      Mueller 

·      Oakwood Cemetery 

·      Parque Zaragoza 

·      Pease District Park 

·      Rosewood Park 

·      South Congress Avenue 

·      Tejano Trails 

·      Texas Capitol and Governor’s Mansion 

·      The Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail 

·      UMLAUF Sculpture Garden 

·      University of Texas at Austin 

·      Waller Creek 

·      Wooldridge Square 

·      Zilker Metropolitan Park

Austin’s park system has grown considerably since the city's founding as the Texas state capital in 1839. Although the first land to be used as a public park was donated in 1875 (Pease District Park), it wasn’t until 1928 that the Austin Recreation Department was established. By 1940 parkland had increased to almost 2,000 acres, with the addition of Zilker and Rosewood Parks, Parque Zaragoza, and other parcels. By the 1960s the land dedicated to parks exceeded 7,000 acres and the Recreation Department was renamed to the City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department, reflecting this emphasis on public open space. Today, there are more than 18,000 acres of public parks along with greenbelts, trails, historic sites, and 30 view corridors that preserve sightlines to the Capitol. As architecture critic Paul Goldberger has said: “Austin is a city that embraces the new, as does so much of Texas, but it connects comfortably and even proudly to the old, as not all of Texas is willing to do.” 

What’s Out There Weekend Austin dovetails with TCLF’s web-based What’s Out There, the nation’s most comprehensive searchable database of historic designed landscapes. The database currently features more than 1,800 sites, 10,000 images, and 900 designer profiles. What’s Out There is optimized for iPhones and similar handheld devices, and includes What’s Nearby, a GPS-enabled function that locates all landscapes in the database within a 25-mile radius of any given location. 

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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