Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR

Mr. Birnbaum is the Founder and President of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Prior to joining TCLF, he spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative (HLI) and a decade in private practice with a focus on landscape preservation and urban design. His 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, 2000) and now Volume II due out in fall 2009. In 1995, the ASLA awarded the HLI the President's Award of Excellence and in 1996 inducted Mr. Birnbaum as a Fellow of the Society. He served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design during which time he founded TCLF. In 2004, he was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation and spent spring/summer of that year at the American Academy in Rome.  In 2007 he was the visiting Glimcher Distinguished Professor at Ohio State’s Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture and was also awarded the Alfred B. LaGasse Medal from the ASLA.

Ted Osmundson and John Simonds at the Grand Canyon, ca 1975.