Exploring Washington’s Cultural Landscapes

Washington is known for its iconic architecture: The Capitol dome, the Washington Monument, the parade of palatial museums along the Mall. But what’s often overlooked is the remarkable array of designed landscapes — parks, gardens, fountains, and other public spaces — that were imagined by a who’s who of internationally renowned landscape architects. This coming weekend, the Cultural Landscape Foundation (CLF) plans to introduce the public to the people behind some of these fabulous public spaces.

What’s Out There Washington is a weekend-long series of events, running from September 25-26, in which expert guides will lead free tours through 25 of the city’s most well-loved green spaces, including Dumbarton Oaks, the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden and Meridian Hill Park, as well as many sites that have often gone overlooked. This is an inaugural event for the CLF, and in many ways it’s a physical manifestation of the vast online database they’ve developed over the past 10 years, which details the historical significance of landscapes throughout the country.

For Charles Birnbaum, the president and founder of the CLF, the weekend is a chance to help address the “cultural amnesia” that has afflicted Americans’ relationship with their public spaces. “How do we teach people to look at the land with a shared value system?” he wondered. Building this series of events was a way to create a holistic approach that both raised the visibility of the places and attached them to the narratives about the people who created them. “People move through these places and they don’t know all of the stories” about them, he said.

For example, he says, few students at Howard University know that much of the campus quadrangle plan was designed by David Williston, one of the more prominent African-American landscape architects in history. And in Meridian Hill Park, a popular weekend destination for D.C. residents, the huge fountain that is the focal part of the park is an Italianate design. Its axis is the Washington Monument, just as the fountains of the Villa Aldobrandini

outside of Rome are aligned with an obelisk there. “A place like Meridian Hill is almost loved to death,” he says. “The narrative will make the experience much richer, and more profound for a visitor.”

Most important, all of the landscapes on the agenda this weekend are public spaces, Birnbaum says, “not in someone’s private home or garden.” So even if you can’t make it to Washington this weekend, visit the CLF website for some insight into green spaces that Birnbaum calls integral to “the civicness and patrimony of our city.”

[What’s Out There Weekend: Washington, D.C]
[Washington’s New Groove – Traveler May/June 2010]

Photos: Above, Morning meditation in Meridian Hill Park, by Susan Seubert/NGS; Below, The gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, courtesy of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.