While the Foundation for Landscape Studies no longer operates as an independent not-for-profit organization, its legacy is being furthered by the University of Virginia’s Landscape Studies Initiative (LSI), a new program within the School of Architecture’s Center for Cultural Landscapes. The multidisciplinary program will be freely available online and is based on Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, which has served as the primary text for landscape studies courses for the past twenty years.

Although the publication of SiteLines has ceased, online copies of each of its biannual issues (Fall 2003 to Spring 2021) will remain on this website as well as on that of the Center for Cultural Landscapes.

On our Publications page, you will note the titles of the seven books that we have produced. Among these are the catalogs that accompanied the two exhibitions we sponsored and co-curated with the Morgan Library & Museum: Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (2010) and City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics (2016). For a further appreciation of the contributions of the Foundation for Landscape Studies to the visual arts, visit our Gallery and view online exhibitions by seven notable photographers of place.

During its fifteen years of active operation, the Foundation for Landscape Studies sponsored an awards program consisting of the David R. Coffin Publication Grant, named in honor of the professor of architecture at Princeton University who was the pioneer scholar of landscape and garden history, and the J. B. Jackson prize awarded to a distinguished book published in the English language within the prior three years. A successor Book Awards Committee, which initially includes the FLS Directors who formerly served in this role, continues its work within the Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia. Applicants will find the guidelines for submission of grant proposals and book-prize candidates at https://www.arch.virginia.edu/ccl/awards-and-publications.

On the Organization page you will find biographies of our former board members. They include those of our primary policy and financial advisors – chairman Frederic Rich and treasurer Nancy Newcomb – and ten other organizational directors who have helped to run the Foundation for Landscape Studies since its inception in 2005.

The dedicated service of the three permanent members of the Awards Committee – Therese O’Malley, Reuben Rainey, and Kenneth Helphand – has significantly furthered the field of landscape studies. The success of our Place Maker / Place Keeper Awards benefits can be credited in large part to the advice and hard work of Antonia Adezio, Robin Karson, and Margaret Sullivan.

Board congeniality and onsite landscape history education have been facilitated by Vincent Buonanno and Scott Burns, who hosted an insiders’ board tour of the great gardens and Gilded Age mansions of Newport and Providence, Rhode Island.

The eminent landscape architect and sketchbook artist Laurie Olin has contributed numerous illustrated essays to SiteLines. As co-curator of the exhibition sponsored by the FLS at the Morgan Library & Museum in 2016, Princeton architectural history professor emeritus John Pinto offered his expertise in rare books, prints, and photographs relating to ancient and Renaissance Rome.

Without the support of this actively engaged board of directors, we would not have earned our current reputation as a nexus of gardeners, landscape architects, historic preservationists, scholars, and writers who are involved with making and protecting landscapes and learning and teaching about landscape as place. And, without the faithful support of friends like you, none of this would have been possible.

The Foundation for Landscape Studies has ceased operations and, subject to receipt of various regulatory approvals, is being dissolved. Our programmatic legacy and remaining financial assets are being transferred to the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture Foundation, a not-for-profit charitable entity that supports the Landscape Studies Initiative of the school’s Center for Landscape Studies.

We are grateful to the Foundation for Landscape Studies’ family of supporters who have made possible the publishing projects, book awards allocations, curatorship of museum exhibitions, and participation in conferences and lecture series that have collectively fulfilled our mission since the formation of the FLS in 2005. In addition, we are especially appreciative of the generosity of friends who are now have honoring these achievements with their gifts to augment the cash balance that we are transferring to the UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes. These intellectual and financial assets will benefit the Center by furthering the growth of its digital landscape studies program and related curricular development of classroom and field-work projects.

Future contributions to the continuation of our legacy by the Center for Cultural Landscapes are being allocated to the UVA Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Fund, which provides general support for the Landscape Studies Initiative and the Landscape Book Awards Fund formed to perpetuate our John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prizes and David R. Coffin Publication Grants. Please note that the recipients of these awards will continue to be selected by an independent committee, which at present consists of the three members of the FLS board who have performed this duty during the past fourteen years. The UVA Center for Cultural Landscape through its founding director, Professor Elizabeth Meyer, will serve as the chairman of this committee.

We would be most grateful for your inaugural gift to the University of Virginia School of Architecture to perpetuate the Foundation for Landscape Studies’ legacy by means of the Landscape Studies Initiative at University of Virginia’s Center for Cultural Landscape Studies. Please donate now.

For details about how to donate through the mail or online to the UVA School of Architecture Foundation’s Elizabeth Barlow Rogers/Landscape Studies Initiative (LSI) Fund, please go to www.arch.virginia.edu/about/ways-to-give. By marking your check or credit-card information form “Assigned to the Elizabeth Barlow Rogers/Landscape Studies Fund” you will be insuring its direct designation to the perpetuating of the Foundation for Landscape studies mission now and in the future.