Normally we're averse to this sort of things. When something is offered for a price, there is little desire here to blog about it. Of course we're not oblivious to the realities of the profession and fully recognize the financial requirements in providing resources for free. So we'd like to turn your attention to the Silent Auction at the ASLA Annual Meeting on 7-9 October 2005. The proceeds will support the development of The Cultural Landscape Foundation's free (truly a most glorious word!) film archive, Landscape Legends: Documenting Landscape Architecture in America, which will feature videotaped oral history interviews with practitioners who have played a key role in shaping the profession and the American landscape.
Some of the items are your garden variety project detritus. In a comical lapse of imagination, Michael van Valkenburgh, Peter Walker, and Cornelia Hahn Oberlander submitted items found on their office floor. (MUST KEEP SAYING: It's all for a good cause.) Fortunately, the rest are not merely beautiful, they reflect the artist's design philosophy. Laurie Olin's watercolors are phenomenal, and Peter Osler's photographs of landscape in the process of submission are truly marvelous. Richard Haag's illicit photograph of the 52nd reconstruction of the main Shinto shrine is not an Ansel Adams, but the admission of a supposed questionable provenance makes it quite personal and rather precious in a way that offering a simple project drawing does not but rather laughable. (It's all for a good cause.)
My favorites are James van Sweden's portrait of Roberto Burle Marx and Todd Eberle's portrait of Dan Kiley, rare insights into how artists see other artists. (Is there a portrait of Ian McHarg by Martha Schwartz or vice versa for bid?) They are rather engaging; we seem to be eavesdropping on their private conversation. Anyone who bids exhorbitantly on these should not feel shortchanged.