What a Year!

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In 2011, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), with tremendous support from our Season of Events Sponsors The Davey Tree Expert Company and Charles Luck Stone Center, achieved several major milestones resulting in significant audience growth, valuable media coverage and attention for landscapes, landscape architecture and practitioners. Highlights include:

What’s Out There Weekend San Francisco

What’s Out There (WOT)

The searchable web feature, What's Out There®, about parks, gardens, and other designed landscapes and their designers grew significantly, and now houses more than 1,200 entries and 8,000 supporting images. WOT also received a ArtWorks Design Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a lead gift from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, enabling the production of our recently launched online mapping component. We added partners University of Virginia, Columbia University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Washington. And WOT took it to the streets for What’s Out There Weekends in Chicago and San Francisco. Supported by the Bartlett Tree Experts and more than two dozen other corporate and private sponsors, the two weekend tours attracted thousands. Looking ahead to 2012, two What’s Out There Weekend events are being planned for Washington, D.C. and New York City.

Symposiums and Conferences

Second Wave of Modernism II Conference

Outreach events remain vital to advancing TCLF’s mission of “stewardship through education.” This year we organized and convened three symposia: the well-attended ninth and final regional conference in our Shaping the American Landscape series was held in April at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles; in June at the Jay Estate in Rye, NY we launched the first in an ongoing series of conferences on the nature/culture divide; and, on November 18th, our Second Wave of Modernism II: Landscape Complexity and Transformation was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2012, a second nature/culture conference is being planned with the Central Park Conservancy focused on its woodlands and a conference about civic horticulture is being organized in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society.

Pioneers Oral History, Staurt O. Dawson

Pioneers Oral History

We launched two compelling and illustrative new Pioneers® oral histories. The first was with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the preeminent Canadian landscape architect, and the second with the Boston-based landscape architect Stuart O. Dawson, a founding partner at Sasaki Associates. Combined, these two have been in practice for more than a century. We have also begun production on oral histories with San Diego-based landscape architect Joe Yamada and Israeli landscape architect Shlomo Aronson.

Landslide

The Landslide® annual thematic compendium of endangered landscapes, The Landscape I Love, celebrated selected landscapes and the often unheralded individuals working tirelessly to safeguard them. The Davey Tree Expert Company returned as the project sponsor and was joined by our new partner in education, Land Trust Alliance. The launch announcement received extensive media coverage including USA Today, CNN, and more than a dozen regional media outlets. The 2010 Landslide Every Tree Tells a Story collection of photographs and outdoor signboards continues to travel. The exhibits are currently on view at Yew Dell Botanical Gardens and the Galleries at 21c (both in Louisville, KY), following successful runs at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s renowned Philadelphia Flower Show and LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, NY (where it received extensive coverage including The New York Times). The Foundation’s Landslide program was bestowed an Honor Award in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Landslide: Every Tree Tells a Story Exhibition,
LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, NY

Advocacy and Awareness

TCLF continued to provide technical assistance at the Annenberg Estate at Sunnylands, in Rancho Mirage, CA; Baldwin Hills Village, a National Historic Landmark community in Los Angeles; the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden; Frederick Edwin Church’s Olana estate in Hudson, NY; Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis; and three Nashville, TN sites – Centennial Park, the Hermitage, and Cheekwood Botanical Gardens. Significantly, our website (www.tclf.org) surged past 6 million hits with more than 600,000 unique visitors due to our conferences, monthly Huffington Post blog features, e-newsletters, and constant Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube postings.

Now more than ever, we thank our supporters for advancing TCLF's ongoing educational initiatives, and helping to protect our irreplaceable landscape legacy.

Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR
President + Founder