Charles A. Birnbaum

Part-time fall 1997 and
spring 1998.

Photo by Doug Cogger.

Charles A. Birnbaum is the coordinator of the Historic Landscape Initiative, a program of the National Park Service Heritage Preservation Services Program. Prior to joining the NPS in 1992, he spent a decade in private practice with a focus on landscape preservation. Representative projects include the Emerald Necklace Parks, Boston, MA; Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY; Lake Washington Boulevard, Seattle, WA; Albemarle Park, Asheville, NC, and, cultural landscape reports for A.J. Downing's Springside and the Vanderbilt Mansion, both National Historic Landmarks.

Current projects at the NPS include the Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes and a public-broadcasting quality film, Connections: Preserving America's Landscape Legacy, narrated by Angela Lansbury. Other projects at the NPS include a Preservation Brief on the subject titled Protecting Cultural Landscapes, and three national database projects: Pioneers of American Landscape Design: An Annotated Bibliography, Making Educated Decisions: A Landscape Preservation Bibliography and A National Directory of Landscape Preservation Organizations. He recently served as guest editor for two editions of CRM and Preservation Forum and as a contributing editor to Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Outside of the NPS, Mr. Birnbaum is an instructor for George Washington University, Center for Career Education and Workshops, Historic Landscape Preservation Program. Last year, the ASLA awarded the Historic Landscape Initiative the President's Award of Excellence, and inducted Mr. Birnbaum as a Fellow of the Society.

As a Loeb Fellow, Mr. Birnbaum explored innovative tools and technologies for instilling a landscape preservation ethic to the broadest audience possible. Mr. Birnbaum also investigated the interface between landscape architecture and historic preservation within the design process.