What’s Out There: An Interactive Catalog of Designed American Cultural Landscapes (2010-01)

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) successfully launched the What’s Out There Project in October 2009. This was achievable because of the critical support from the 2009 NCPTT grant to complete the database structure and advance the development of the program content. This project is the culmination of eight years of effort and research to create a vehicle which would raise the profile of the designed landscape. TCLF with the help of both staff and TCLF Board advisers in the academic and professional world has gathered information on over 1,400 designed landscapes.Spanning more than two centuries of American landscape design, What’s Out There is the only free, Wiki‐style database focused on the nation’s landscapes and landscape features, and is searchable by landscape name, type, and/or style, landscape architect and/or designer, and/or location. It is designed for use by tourists and heritage travelers; local residents; park, garden and landscape aficionados; historians, landscape architects, planners and other specialists; and the general public.

The What’s Out There program aims to make landscape more visible, to raise the awareness of our unique cultural heritage, to identify this significant design legacy and raise the profile of sites for consideration for National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmark listing. What’s Out There incorporates historic designed landscapes from all 50 states. It contains National Historic Landmark (NHL) properties which are designated with significance in landscape.

In addition it culls from the approximately 1,900 National Register of Historic Places sites listed with landscape significance to include those which relate to the designed landscape. To launch this program a new web‐based, interactive site was developed by outside experts in this area of content management systems. TCLF staff developed an extensive evaluation of landscape types and styles and created a Glossary of terms which guided the categorization of landscape sites.

Additionally, site descriptions for each landscape were written and biographical profiles were composed by TCLF staff and outside experts. These descriptions were illustrated by photographs which were culled from the TCLF image archives. The initial launch included 380 profiles on landscape architects and designers and more than 650 sites nationally. What’s Out There has begun the dialog to make visible these landscapes and created a place where students, academics, preservationists, and the general public can share and gain information. It is our hope that as the site expands with new contributions the richness of its resources will inspire additional scholarship.

Link to Product: http://tclf.org/landscapes