Why Not Cultural Systems?
Design, Historic Preservation and Cultural Landscapes

Charles Birnbaum
President of The Cultural Landscape Foundation and Author of Making Postwar Landscapes Visible

Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, is the Founder and President of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Prior to joining TCLF, Charles 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. Charles' 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 the latest volume, Shaping the American Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2009). In 1995, the ASLA awarded the HLI the President's Award of Excellence and in 1996 inducted Charles as a Fellow of the Society. Charles served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Design during which time he founded TCLF. In 2004, Charles was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation and spent spring/summer of that year at the American Academy in Rome. In 2008, 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. This past September Charles was awarded the ASLA President's Medal by the Society's President, Angela Dye.

Organized by the Historic Preservation Program, GSAPP