TCLF’s latest conference, Second Wave of Modernism IV: Making Space within Place, was held on October 4, 2019, in the Horchow Auditorium at the Dallas Museum of Art. The conference featured several Dallas-based experts who were joined by others from throughout the United States. The topics were equally varied and timely, focusing on the role that landscape architects have played in laying the foundation for today’s planning and design work (exploring several iconic projects completed in the Dallas Arts District over the past 35 years); city projects that balance design against natural and cultural values, and the imperative to deal with climate change; how a public-private partnership was able to facilitate the development of priority parks in the urban core; and recent innovations in creative management and stewardship. To learn more about the conference, please visit: https://tclf.org/second-wave-modernism-iv-making-space-within-place-conference
Making Space within Place – Foundations for Change:
Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, President & CEO, The Cultural Landscape Foundation
Making Space from Place and the Increasing Visibility and Appreciation of Landscape Architecture
As the forthcoming presentations will attest, Dallas is indeed a growing city with ambitious plans. And as this conference will demonstrate, Dallas can now take its rightful place among a handful of cities that are raising the bar in planning, designing, and maintaining parks and open spaces as both centers of energies in the communities they serve and as nodes in an interconnected collection of public spaces that are, by design, porous and equitable. These places are being realized and managed through the efforts of innovative public-private partnerships, generous philanthropists, and strategically positioned non-profits, often with landscape architects leading the way, not only in design but also through meaningful public engagement.
But in order to fully understand the present one must always look first to the past. It was 143 years ago that Dallas began to establish its first public park, City Park, in 1876. And 100 years ago, on February 10, 1919, Mayor Joseph Lawther appointed a temporary City Plan Commission to advise on “all natures of public improvements, civic improvements, and city planning” and to “secure a charter amendment providing an official city plan commission.” With these important dates as a launching point, this presentation will provide an overview of the earlier planning efforts that were the precursors to the work that is now underway. To illustrate this continuum of design and planning, we will look back at city plans and park plans by George Kessler, Harland Bartholomew (with landscape architects Hare & Hare), and Hargreaves Associates, recognizing how the individual and collective planning goals of earlier generations are in many cases being realized only now.
The presentation will also highlight significant strides that were made along the way. We will look back to the City Beautiful era, for example, when the business community and the municipal education bureaucracies surprisingly advocated to keep Kessler’s ideas about comprehensive planning alive; and we will examine trends of the Modernist era, which focused once more on pedestrians and the idea that parks can attract and serve visitors year-round, while responding to the call for freedom of movement, porous edges, and park equity. Finally, the case will be made that here in Dallas, especially in the city’s Arts District, exceptional works of landscape architecture have been elevated to the highest levels of art, taking their rightful place alongside great works of architecture and sculpture.
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