The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s What’s Out There Weekend, scheduled for May 18 and 19, features free, expert-led tours at more than two-dozen significant examples of Philadelphia’s landscape architecture, including hidden gems in Fairmount Park (below,) the Beaux Arts grounds of the Rodin Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Colonial Revival design near Independence Hall, the groundbreaking Modernist expressions of Society Hill, and the Postmodernist plazas of Venturi Scott Brown. The tours reveal the back story about city shaping, landscape architecture and the design history of significant landscapes all over the city. Many are places people pass daily, but do we know their background stories?
What’s Out There Weekend dovetails with the Web-based What’s Out There, the nation’s most comprehensive searchable database of historic designed landscapes. The database offers a broad and interconnected way to discover the breadth of America’s historic designed landscapes, while What’s Out There Weekend gives people the opportunity to experience the landscapes they might see every day in a new way. Registration is available on line at www.tclf.org.
