When Docomomo US was created more than 30 years ago, we set out to build a network of like-minded individuals to offer leadership, knowledge, and enthusiasm for the modern movement, which was little and little appreciated. We could not have envisioned the remarkable change in public attitude toward modernism we see today. Every year we thank and acknowledge our longstanding members in a formal way and recognized them during the Docomomo US Modernism in America Awards Ceremony. 

Docomomo US Executive Director reflects on the selection of this year's annual theme and how sites of recreation and play are not simply backdrops to our memories, but help shape who we become and the dreams we have along the way.

In the 1960s, landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg designed two comparable playground schemes for public housing: Jacob Riis Plaza in New York and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. Both drew on the same design vocabulary, yet their afterlives diverged sharply. Riis became a canonical example of postwar playground design, while the Pruitt-Igoe playgrounds are largely absent from the architectural record. Their contrasting fates reveal how race, philanthropy, public visibility, and federal housing policy have shaped the preservation and remembrance of modern recreational landscapes.

This essay examines how the Silver Springs and Paradise Park attractions in Ocala, Florida, reflect the changing beliefs of the time within the cultural landscape. It focuses on three different managers and the themes of segregation, progress, and modernity. The authors look at the parks in parallel as thriving attractions and the various changes they go through. The essay highlights Silver Springs and the visions of progress seen in the construction of the Tourist Center by architect Victor Lundy and the slow shift away from his modern vision for the spring.  At the same time, the authors showcase Paradise Park’s importance in the community and its closure and erasure. The essay concludes with recent preservation and interpretation efforts that have begun to acknowledge these histories.

In 1948, a new kind of recreational landscape opened on San Antonio's South Side. The Mission Drive-In Theatre brought automobiles, neon, Hollywood movies, and family entertainment to the edge of Mission San José, one of the city's historic Spanish colonial missions. Rather than enclosing its audience within a conventional theater, the drive-in transformed a large tract of land into an outdoor auditorium: here, cars became seats and the building became the screen. The Mission Drive-In Theatre, now nown as the Mission Marquee Plaza, placed a distinctly modern, commercial form of leisure alongside a historic landscape increasingly shaped by preservation and tourism. Its history offers a window into the ways that mid-century San Antonio negotiated modern recreation, cultural heritage, and racial access.

Over the past sixty years, the plaza at the heart of the West Los Angeles Civic Center has experienced an unexpected and thrilling evolution. Confronted with ongoing redevelopment pressures, negative public perceptions, and limited resources, diverse community coalitions have effectively defended and enhanced a treasured global destination that allows people of all backgrounds, interests, and abilities to connect, create, and thrive.

By the end of the nineteenth century, children were beginning to acquire places of their own within the city. Playgrounds were among them, providing an alternative to streets increasingly considered dangerous for play. But they soon became something more complex: carefully bounded spaces where freedom was promised but only granted on adult terms. Across a century of design experiments—from picturesque parks to radical landscapes—a question persists: can a space protect children without prescribing how they should play? This essay traces how landscape thinking has offered alternatives to the standardized playground, and what that history reveals about childhood, public space, and design.

La Laguna de San Gabriel is an otherworldly playscape in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, built in 1965 by master concrete artist Benjamin Dominguez. One of the last surviving midcentury fantasy playgrounds, it was saved from demolition by local historians and grassroots advocacy. Six decades on, it demonstrates that artist-designed playscapes, rooted in the land and surrounding culture, can anchor public life, uplift intergenerational community, and nurture belonging tied to place.

In 1969, American artist Paul Selinger unveiled Shek Lei Playground, a sculptural landscape of cast concrete forms, painted rock faces, and abstract play settings — Hong Kong's first playground conceived as a work of art. Though erased by later renovations, its influence has quietly resurfaced in recent play spaces across the city. Fan Lok-Yi revisits Selinger's lost masterpiece and its unexpected afterlife in contemporary Hong Kong play design.

Update: New protections for Kennedy Center issued by judge.

A coalition of eight leading cultural heritage and architectural organizations jointly represented by three law firms today filed suit [GW1] in federal district court in Washington, DC seeking to require the Trump administration to comply with historic preservation laws and secure Congressional authorization before implementing the President’s plans to further alter the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

On Friday, July 18, the Vice Chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) circulated a proposal that would fundamentally alter—and, in many respects, dismantle—the federal Section 106 review process as it has existed for decades. The ACHP is expected to vote on the proposal this Friday. If approved by a majority of Council members, it will be released for a 30-day public comment period.

An introduction and conversation with Alexandra Lange.

Tracing the journey of the adventure playground from its start in Europe to its positive reception in the counterculture of Northern California’s Bay Area.

Explore the figurative play-sculptures of Mexican-born sculptor and playground designer Benjamín Domínguez (1894-1974).

For a generation of South Florida children, Don Seiler's monumental Sunbather was more than public art. It was a place to climb, imagine, fall down, and grow up.

Throughout New England, town greens historically functioned as places where communities assembled for militia training, markets, public debate, and celebration. The Alfred E. Burr Memorial Mall, known to most Hartford residents simply as ‘Burr Mall,’ occupies a significant urban position and carries the town green tradition into the twenty-first century through modernist design.

Located in the heart of Chicago’s Loop, Chase Tower opened in 1969 as the First National Bank of Chicago. The building and its plaza, now known as Exelon Plaza, occupy the entire downtown block bounded by Clark, Dearborn, Madison, and Monroe Streets. The building’s plaza held its own significance as a vibrant public space. Completed in 1972, Exelon Plaza gained its own reputation as a cornerstone of Chicago skateboarding culture.

Recent news stories and dramatic AI renderings depicting a proposed $22 billion transformation of Washington Dulles International Airport have generated significant concern within the preservation community. Saarinen's 1962 terminal is recognized nationally and internationally as an icon of twentieth-century design and engineering, and the airport remains one of the country's most important Modern cultural resources.

Conference proceedings are now available for the 19th International Docomomo Conference, which took place in Los Angeles, California from March 17-22, 2026.

The following remarks by Paul Goldberger were presented during the roundtable session, "Advocating for the ‘-isms’: Late-Modernism, Postmodernism, and Brutalism," during the 19th International Docomomo Conference in Los Angeles.