BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE: CHARLES A. BIRNBAUM, FASLA Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, is the coordinator of the Historic Landscape Initiative, a program of the National Park Service Heritage Preservation Services Program. Prior to joining the NPS is 1992, Charles spent a decade in private practice with a focus on the preservation of historic landscapes. Representative preservation planning projects include the Emerald Necklace Parks, Boston, Massachusetts; Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York; Lake Washington Boulevard, Seattle, Washington; Albemarle Park, Asheville, North Carolina, and, cultural landscape reports for Andrew Jackson Downing's Springside and the Vanderbilt Mansion, both National Historic Landmarks. Recent NPS projects include the on-line technical series, Cultural Landscape Currents, the publication, Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes and a public-broadcasting quality film, Connections: Preserving America's Landscape Legacy, narrated by Angela Lansbury. Other NPS projects include a Preservation Brief 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 has recently served as guest editor for two editions of CRM, The George Wright Forum, and Preservation Forum, has been a contributing editor both Landscape Architecture Magazine and Land Forum. Outside of the NPS, Charles also served as an instructor for George Washington University, Center for Career Education and Workshops, Historic Landscape Preservation Program and currently leads workshops for the National Preservation Institute and the Professional Development Program at the Harvard Design School. He has served as chair of the ASLA Historic Preservation Committee, co-chair of the National Association of Olmsted Parks and co-chair of US/ICOMOS Historic Landscape Committee. Charles has just completed editing Pioneers of American Landscape Landscape Design for McGraw Hill and Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture for Spacemaker Press. He currently serves as a co-editor for, Cultural Landscapes: Expanding the Realm of Historic Preservation for John Wiley Publishers and Landscape Preservation in Context, 1890-1950 for the University of Virginia Press. In 1995, the ASLA awarded the Historic Landscape Initiative the President's Award of Excellence, and in 1996 inducted Charles as a Fellow of the Society. In 1998, Charles served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvards Graduate School of Design during which time he founded the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to stewardship through education.
