Stewardship Excellence Award: Charlene Roise
After a four-year hiatus (due to the global pandemic), The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announced a new recipient of the foundation’s Stewardship Excellence Award. The honor was created in 2001 to “highlight stewardship stories that will educate and inspire future generations of cultural landscape stewards.” The announcement of the recipient was made on Friday, October 27, at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, MN, overlooking the Modernist masterwork, Peavey Plaza, originally designed by M. Paul Friedberg. The recipient, Charlene Roise of Minneapolis, was recognized for her many years of advocacy on behalf of Peavey Plaza, which had been threatened with demolition. The event coincided with the American Society of Landscape Architects Annual Conference on Landscape Architecture, which was taking place in Minneapolis.
Roise is a founding partner of Hess, Roise and Company in 1990, a historical consulting firm that specializes in National Register of Historic Places nominations, cultural resource surveys, preservation planning, interpretive exhibits, historic structure and historic landscape reports, archival research, documentation studies, Section 106/Section 4(f) compliance, and historic tax credit applications. After serving as the firm’s president from 1997 until 2020, she sold the business to two long-time coworkers.
Roise coauthored the successful nomination for Peavey Plaza’s 2013 listing in the National Register, and, advocated as a TCLF Board Member to save this Modernist landscape from demolition by the City. More recently, as a coauthor of the successful Hiawatha Golf Course National Register nomination (2022), Roise has led by example putting the cultural landscape resource first, often taking on the work in a pro bono capacity, and/or freely accepting the risk that taking on such work might alienate potential clients, such as municipalities, and restrict wok opportunities. Charlene Roise is a courageous and true leader and an inspiration to the landscape architecture and cultural landscape disciplines; her work has raised the visibility of important works of landscape architecture, their designers, and their cultural legacies, which otherwise might have been lost forever.