Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, is Founder and President of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Prior to joining TCLF, Mr. Birnbaum spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative and a decade in private practice with a focus on landscape preservation and urban design. Mr. Birnbaum’ most recent projects include the award-winning on-line series, Cultural Landscapes as Classrooms and editing Design with Culture: Claiming America’s Landscape Heritage for the University Press of Virginia. He has also edited Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture and its follow-up publication, Making Post-War Landscapes Visible for Spacemaker Press, Pioneers of American Landscape Design (McGraw Hill Companies, June 2000) and the follow up, Shaping the American Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2009). In 1995, the ASLA awarded the Initiative the President's Award of Excellence and in 1996 inducted Mr. Birnbaum as a Fellow of the Society. Mr. Birnbaum served as a Loeb Fellow in 1998 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design during which time he founded TCLF. Mr. Birnbaum is an instructor for the National Preservation Institute and in 2004 was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and spent spring/summer of that year at the American Academy in Rome. Most recently he was the 2007 recipient of the LaGasse Medal and the 2009 recipient of the President's Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Staff
See Also: Board Members
Melanie Macchio is Senior Project Manager for The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Prior to joining TCLF, she worked for private preservation firms in La Jolla, California, and, more recently, Washington, D.C. She has managed several large-scale historic resource survey projects including the Uptown San Diego Historic Resources Survey and the Purcellville, Virginia, National Historic District Survey, as well as intensive multiple property surveys for the City of Riverside, California. Ms. Macchio has a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Resource Management from the University of California, Riverside and a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Lake Forest College in Illinois.
Andrea Hill is a Project Manager for The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Ms. Hill holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Historic Preservation/Architectural Conservation from Roger Williams University School of Art, Architecture and Historic Preservation in Rhode Island. She has over 20 years of project management experience, having worked in the private sector as a manager then later as an architectural conservator before working as a grants administrator/architectural historian at the National Park Service. She joined TCLF in 2007 to assist with the production of Shaping the American Landscape (2009) and What’s Out There.
Nancy Slade comes to The Cultural Landscape Foundation after working at the National Park Service, Historic Landscape Initiative (HLI) in Washington, D.C. There her job responsibilities included management of the Index of Designed American Landscapes. She also coordinated several HLI publications, including Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture II (2004), Design with Culture (2005), and Shaping the American Landscape (2009). In addition, she has authored essays on John Simonds and Lester Collins for Shaping the American Landscape. She holds a Masters of Landscape Architecture from Virginia Tech.
Robert Griffith is a partner in the Louisville, Kentucky, office of Stites & Harbison, PLLC a law firm with over 260 lawyers in offices located throughout the southeast. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Centre College, a Master of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Kentucky. Mr. Griffith began his career in the New York offices of White & Case. He is a fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America and is listed in The Best Lawyers in America, Kentucky Superlawyers, and Chambers USA’s Best Lawyers for Business. Throughout his career he has specialized in business litigation. More recently, his representation of River Fields, Inc. and the Bluegrass Conservancy has resulted in an increased concentration on conservation easements, issues surrounding the protection of historic and environmental resources, and non-profit governance. He has been an active community volunteer and has served as the Chairman of the Board of Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, Chairman of the Better Business Bureau of Louisville, and President of the Episcopal Church Home. He is currently President of Preservation Louisville, Inc. and Secretary of Yew Dell Gardens. He lives with his wife, Mary, on their family’s 700-acre farm in Meade County, Kentucky.