The Cultural Landscape Foundation 2nd Annual Silent Auction
TCLF will bring its popular silent auction to the 2006 ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO and 43rd IFLA World Congress hoping to top the impressive $30,000 it raised last year for the Landscape Legends initiative.

Greywache Arch, Central Park, by Victoria Cooper, will be one of several original photographs available at The Cultural Landscape Foundation's Silent Auction.

Last year The Cultural Landscape Foundation brought a new tradition to the ASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO through its silent auction of sketches, paintings, watercolors, photographs, and other ephemera created by notable landscape architects. Over three days during the meeting, these artifacts were on display in the convention hall for attendees to view and bid on. In the end, the silent auction was a huge success, raising more than $30,000 for the development of TCLF’s forthcoming free video archive, Landscape Legends: Documenting Landscape Architecture in America.

On the back of that success, TCLF is again bringing the silent auction to this year’sASLA Annual Meeting & EXPO and 43rd IFLA World Congress in the hopes of meeting and perhaps exceeding the success of last year’s auction. TCLF has gathered an even larger collection of items for the auction than it had last year and will set them up for display in the mezzanine level of the Minneapolis Convention Center. Bidding on items will take place from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM on Saturday, October 7, and Sunday, October 8, and from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM on Monday, October 9.

This year’s auction will include works by Jane Amidon; Keiji Asakura, ASLA; Gregg Bleam, ASLA; Dennis Carmichael, FASLA; Patrick Chassé, ASLA; Sandra Youssef Clinton, FASLA; Victoria Cooper; Rick Darke; Topher Delaney, ASLA; Chris Faust; Roger Foley, Affiliate ASLA; Tom Fox; Marta Fry, ASLA; Eric Fulford; Lyle Gomes; Stephen Harby; Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA; Dale Horchner; Carol Johnson, FASLA; Ilze Jones, FASLA; Joe Lalli, FASLA; Amy Lamb; Diane Love; Alex MacLean; Roberto Burle Marx, Honorary ASLA; Thomas Oslund, FASLA; Ted Osmundson, FASLA; Doug Reed, FASLA; William Roberts; Robert Sabbatini, ASLA; Peter Lindsay Schaudt, ASLA; Jim Sheldon; Kevin Sloan; Walter Smalling Jr.; Ken Smith, ASLA; Ed Stone Jr., FASLA; James van Sweden, FASLA; Alan Ward, ASLA; Bill Wenk, FASLA; and Thomas Woltz, ASLA, among others.

TCLF launched the Landscape Legends oral history initiative in 2003, with the goal of documenting, collecting, and preserving the unique, firsthand perspectives of renowned landscape practitioners and to make them available for future generations of stewards, designers, and researchers in a free, online archive. With generous support from the SWA Group and Topher Delaney, ASLA, TCLF has already filmed such landscape luminaries as Dan Kiley; Lawrence Halprin, FASLA; Richard Haag, FASLA; Ruth Patricia Shellhorn, FASLA; and Ted Osmundson, FASLA. As an ancillary activity to this year’s auction, the TCLF will also partner with the Society to interview and tape M. Paul Friedberg, FASLA, as part of our first collaborative, “Inside the LA Studio” session to be held Friday, October 6.

In addition to serving a good cause, the TCLF Silent Auction adds a new dimension to the annual meeting, turning an otherwise unused portion of the exhibit hall into a temporary art gallery that all meeting attendees can peruse and admire. Also, because many of the items up for auction are plans and landscape sketches, it provides students and younger practitioners a glimpse into the minds of well-known, and soon-to-be-well-known, landscape architects. TCLF founder Charles Birnbaum notes that last year, plans for New York City’s teardrop park by Michael Van Valkenburgh, FASLA, drew crowds of students eager for a first-hand look at the plans.

For more information on The Cultural Landscape Foundation and the silent auction, visit the group’s website at www.tclf.org.