How do cultural landscapes shape our shared public memory? How do our collective planning, design and stewardship decisions affect how we assign value and manage change? Once a project is built, how do we measure success?
In an attempt to address these challenges, what role can – and should -- Landscape Architecture play as collaborative participants in a national reckoning? How can the discipline prepare themselves to develop the necessary awareness and tools to address historical (and purposeful) erasure, spatial nostalgia, memorials of the past, antiquated rigidity of historic government standards -- and – in response, how can we commemorate the past in our shared public realm in our cities, parks, campuses (academic, cultural), and elsewhere – by amplifying community voices?
This lecture examines the planning, design, and stewardship opportunities -- and constraints -- frequently encountered when dealing with managing change and shared cultural landscape heritage.
Speaker Bio:
Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, is the president, CEO, and founder of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Prior to creating TCLF, Birnbaum spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative (HLI) and a decade in private practice in New York City, with a focus on landscape preservation and urban design. He is a Lecturer in Landscape Achitecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
