Inaugural Historic Preservation Lecture: Charles A. Birnbaum

Monday, Apr 19, 2021 6 PM – 7:30 PM CST

Online Event | Click here to attend and/or register

Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, the president, CEO, and founder of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), will deliver the inaugural Historic Preservation Lecture online.

Prior to creating TCLF, Birnbaum spent fifteen years because the coordinator of the park Service Historic Landscape Initiative (HLI) and a decade privately practice in ny City, with attention on landscape preservation and concrete design. Since taking the helm at the inspiration in 2008, Birnbaum’s major projects include the web-based initiative What’s Out There (a searchable database of the nation’s designed landscape heritage) and therefore the creation of the primary International Prize in architecture named for Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. He has authored and edited numerous publications, including Shaping the Postwar Landscape, (UVA Press, 2018), the fashionable Landscapes: Transition and Transformation series (Princeton Architectural Press, Volumes printed in 2012 and 2014), Shaping the American Landscape (UVA Press, 2009), Design with Culture: Claiming America’s Landscape Heritage (UVA Press, 2005), Preserving Modern architecture (1999) and its follow-up publication, Making Post-War Landscapes Visible (2004, both for Spacemaker Press), Pioneers of yank Landscape Design (McGraw Hill, 2000) and therefore the Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes (National Park Service, 1996).

In 1995, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) awarded the HLI the President’s Award of Excellence. In 1996, the ASLA inducted Birnbaum as a Fellow of the Society. He served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s grad school of Design, during which era he founded TCLF. In 2004, Birnbaum was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation and spent the spring and summer of that year at the American Academy in Rome. In 2008, he was the Visiting Glimcher Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University’s Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture. that very same year, the ASLA awarded him the Alfred B. LaGasse Medal, followed by the President’s Medal in 2009. In 2017, Birnbaum received the ASLA Medal, the Society’s highest award. Birnbaum has served as a professor at Columbia University’s grad school of Architecture, a visiting critic at Harvard’s GSD, and currently is a teacher in architecture at Harvard’s grad school of Design. He was also a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post (2011-18). In 2020 Birnbaum received the Landezine International Landscape Honour Award also because the Garden Club of America’s Historic Preservation Medal.