The Cultural Landscape Foundation® (TCLF), a non-profit established in 1998, connects people to places. TCLF educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards. TCLF achieves this mission through the ongoing development of its four core programs: What’s Out There®, Pioneers of American Landscape Design®, Landslide®, and The Oberlander Prize. Please join us to learn more about Charles and his ongoing passion projects. 

The Cultural Landscape Foundation : https://tclf.org/

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.

Since taking the helm at the foundation in 2008, Birnbaum’s major projects include the web-based initiative What’s Out There (a searchable database of the nation’s designed landscape heritage) and the creation of the first International Prize in Landscape Architecture named for Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

He has authored and edited numerous publications, including Shaping the Postwar Landscape, the Modern Landscapes: Transition and Transformation series, Shaping the American Landscape, Design with Culture: Claiming America’s Landscape Heritage, Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture and its follow-up publication, Making Post-War Landscapes Visible, Pioneers of American Landscape Design, and The Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes.

In 1995, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) awarded the HLI the President's Award of Excellence. In 1996, the ASLA inducted Birnbaum as a Fellow of the Society. He served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, during which time he founded TCLF. In 2004, Birnbaum was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation and spent the spring and summer of that year at the American Academy in Rome. In 2008, he was the Visiting Glimcher Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University's Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture. That same year, the ASLA awarded him the Alfred B. LaGasse Medal, followed by the President’s Medal in 2009. In 2017, Birnbaum received the ASLA Medal, the Society's highest award. Birnbaum has served as a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, a visiting critic at Harvard’s GSD, and currently serves as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He was also a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post (2011-18). In 2020 Birnbaum received the Landezine International Landscape Honor Award as well as the Garden Club of America’s Historic Preservation Medal.

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