2018 Year in Review
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2018 Year in Review

With you as our champion, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) marked its twentieth year with an exceptional record of accomplishments. Advocacy and education continue to be the primary ways we fulfill our mission of “connecting people to places.” Looking to 2019, we will be advancing with even more ambitious projects, programs, events, and other initiatives to increase the understanding of and support for landscape architecture and its practitioners, as well as our shared landscape legacy.

Here are highlights from the ‘2018 Year in Review’ that your generosity made possible:

  • ORGANIZED – A sold-out conference: Leading with Landscape IV: Transforming North Carolina’s Research Triangle; and What’s Out There Weekends in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and San Antonio, Texas, which drew thousands of attendees; twenty Garden Dialogues across the country, in honor of TCLF’s twentieth anniversary;
  • ADVOCATED – Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy focused on threatened sites associated with civil rights, the labor movement, women’s suffrage, and other themes. We continue to advocate for several “at-risk” sites, including Olmsted’s Jackson Park in Chicago; Russell Page’s viewing garden at the Frick Collection, New York City; Paul Friedberg’s Modernist Pershing Park in Washington, D.C.; and Clermont Lee’s parterre garden at the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace in Savannah, Georgia. Meanwhile, Mount Vernon in Virginia, Fort Negley in Nashville, Tennessee, Princeton Battlefield in New Jersey, Freeway Park in Seattle, Washington, Carousel Park in Santa Monica, California, and 140 Broadway in New York City were all moved to the “saved” column;
  • EXPANDED – TCLF’s What's Out There (WOT) database of North America’s cultural landscapes surpassed 2,100 sites. TCLF unveiled new WOT guidebooks and online guides to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and San Antonio, Texas, and released the WOT Cultural Landscapes Guide to Richmond—produced in partnership with the National Park Service;
  • INCREASED ­­– A video oral history with Joe Karr, the first of three practitioners to be featured who worked for the Office of Dan Kiley, and our fifteenth subject in the Pioneers of American Landscape Design Oral History series, was completed;
  • CONTINUED – Three traveling photographic exhibitions (one each about Lawrence Halprin, Oehme, van Sweden, and Dan Kiley) were hosted at myriad cultural institutions throughout the United States, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Kansas State University, Fort Worth Community Arts Center, NorthPark Center in Dallas, Texas, and the Boston Architectural College;
  • PUBLISHED – Shaping the Postwar Landscape: New Profiles from the Pioneers of American Landscape Design Project was published by the University of Virginia Press, and What’s Out There guidebooks to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and San Antonio, Texas, were also published.
Landing page for Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy
Landing page for Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy -

Here are some details from the 2018 Year in Review:

Landslide, our annual thematic report about threatened and at-risk landscapes, continues to be one of our most high-profile and effective initiatives. Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy included a broad range of sites associated with civil rights, the labor movement, women’s suffrage, and other themes.

TCLF has three monographic Landslide exhibitions traveling concurrently: In 2018 The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin spent most of the year in Texas, at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center then at NorthPark Center in Dallas, before traveling to the Boston Architectural College. The New American Garden: The Landscape Architecture of Oehme, van Sweden was hosted at Kansas State University. The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley was hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and will be shown at the University of California, Berkeley, and in Palm Springs, California, in conjunction with Modernism Week.

Several individual Landslide sites also continue to be priorities: Advocacy efforts for several “at-risk” sites continued, including Olmsted’s Jackson Park in Chicago, Illinois; Russell Page’s viewing garden at the Frick Collection, New York City; Paul Friedberg’s Modernist Pershing Park in Washington, D.C.; Clermont Lee’s parterre garden at the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace in Savannah, Georgia (TCLF and Gordon Low descendants have commissioned design concepts that would retain the garden); and the Haas and Sherover Promenades in Jerusalem, Israel, designed by Lawrence Halprin and Shlomo Aronson, respectively. Meanwhile, Mount Vernon in Virginia, Fort Negley in Nashville, Tennessee, Princeton Battlefield in New Jersey, Freeway Park in Seattle, Washington, Carousel Park in Santa Monica, California, and 140 Broadway in New York City were all moved to the “saved” column.

Landing page for What’s Out There Cultural Landscape Guide to Richmond produced in collaboration with the National Park Service
Landing page for What’s Out There Cultural Landscape Guide to Richmond produced in collaboration with the National Park Service -

What’s Out There the searchable online database of designed landscapes, has grown to include more than 2,100 entries, 11,000 images, and 1,100 designer profiles, making it the nation’s most comprehensive guide of its kind. TCLF held What’s Out There Weekends in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and San Antonio, Texas, and, in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS), released on line Cultural Landscapes Guides to Richmond, Virginia (another for Baltimore, Maryland, will be completed by year’s end).  

Pioneers Oral Histories launched the first part of an oral history with three pioneers who worked in the office of Dan Kiley, this one featuring Joe Karr.