| Preserving
Modern Landscape Architecture and Making Post War Designs
Visible |
Charles
A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR
Coordinator, National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative
and Founder, The Cultural Landscape Foundation |
From America’s first vest pocket park in New
York City to the nation’s first Modernist roof garden in
Oakland, CA, we must have a commitment to these historic designed
landscapes from the recent past. It was during this period immediately
following WWII, that one great surge of collective energies –
the Modern movement, which redefined traditional values, beliefs,
and artistic forms that evolved over centuries of the Western
world took hold in the landscape architecture and urban design
professions.
Unfortunately, reasoned criticism did not follow, and until recently,
Modern landscapes slipped beyond even the peripheral vision of
art historians, and worse, had been neglected or razed. To date,
preservationists, landscape architects, historians and the general
public have rarely come together to protect this often “invisible”
collection of public and private places that collectively represent
a significant chapter in our nation’s evolution. Today,
if we allow continued losses and modifications to this work, unmonitored
by the profession and allied communities, we run the risk of editing-out
a significant chapter in the evolution of our cities.
Possible book for signing: Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture
II: Making Postwar Landscapes Visible, Spacemaker Press
$29.95
Richly illustrated, this collection of seventeen essays includes
noted historians, writers, preservationists, and landscape architects
who present a myriad of issues surrounding the preservation and
management of Modern landscapes. From four countries, these diverse
essays chronicle often “invisible” landscapes by celebrating
the legacies of, among others, Dan Kiley, Lawrence Halprin, Hideo
Sasaki, Robert Zion, M. Paul Friedberg, and Sir Peter Shepeard.
About
Charles Birnbaum
Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, is the coordinator of the National
Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative. Prior to joining the
NPS in 1992, Charles spent a decade in private practice with a
focus on landscape preservation and urban design. Charles’
most recent projects include the 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,
June 2000) and now Volume II due out in 2008. In 1995, the ASLA
awarded the Initiative the President's Award of Excellence and
in 1996 inducted Charles as a Fellow of the Society. Charles served
as a Loeb Fellow in 1998 at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design during which time he founded The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Charles is an instructor for the National Preservation Institute.
Most recently, Charles was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic
Preservation and will spend spring 2004 at the American Academy
in Rome.
