Charles A. Birnbaum

UCLA occupies an esteemed position in the world of higher education and has many generous supporters. In fact, on March 16, 2012, a Chronicle of Higher Education headline trumpeted their fundraising prowess -- In Education: UCLA Endowment Is Fastest-Growing Among Major U.S. Schools -- and on March 15,...

Modernism, despite the popularity of Mad Men and shelter magazines like Dwell, is under assault. Iconic works of architecture and landscape architecture from the 1960s and 1970s have a particularly high mortality rate, though because of cultural and other biases, it's usually the endangered buildings we hear about and not...

Good news for landscape architects: Your employment prospects are better than those of building architects and your work is appreciated more than ever -- think of the High Line.

Bad news, you don't always get the credit -- think of the High Line.

Pop quiz:...

Grand civic gestures, courtesy entrepreneurial public-private partnerships, and some deep-pocketed donors are pumping new life into some old guard cities, among them New York and Philadelphia, where urban parks are "in" and planners speak of the "Highline effect" as they once did of the "Bilbao effect."...

It's year-end list-o-mania time and the email carpet-bombing of "best," "worst" and "top 10" lists, etc. is straining global server capacity. The architecture community's seemingly endless thematic round ups include buildings that are green, nature-inspired and spooky, along with free-range, macrobiotic and gluten-free.

OK, I made up those last...

Excitement has turned to disappointment in Minneapolis, and what's happening there should be a warning about safeguarding transparency in public process and civic debate. Right now, Minneapolis has a golden opportunity to revitalize Peavey Plaza, an award-winning modernist masterwork recently determined eligible to the National Register of Historic...

If you think disco diva Cheryl Lynn is about to pop up and start singing "... to be real" everywhere you go, it's probably because the concept of authenticity is now almost ubiquitous as a brand attribute, personality description, advertising slogan and travel experience.

Indeed, authenticity is not just for...

The transformation of the urban core, as I've written before, is hot, hot, hot. Currently, there's a great deal of attention focused (justifiably) on the much-talked-about opening of the second phase of the much-talked-about High Line in New York, which has put yet more vim into that city's...

There's good news and bad news for landscape architecture. On the positive side, employment prospects look very strong for the next few years. The National Endowment for the Arts report Artist Employment Projections through 2018 projects a 20% growth rate for the profession (compared with a 10% overall...

Nostalgia is suddenly under siege -- particularly in the guise of historic preservation. Nostalgia, once roused by the demolition of New York's Penn Station, was a great motivator in saving Grand Central Terminal. Today, however, the form of nostalgia we know as historic preservation is getting beaten up on all...

This week saw the passing of a distinct American icon -- it wasn't a movie star, stage actor, trusted political confidant or mysterious artist -- it was an elm tree in Brookline, Massachusetts. Upending that old phrase about not seeing the forest for the trees, this tree does help us...

When it comes to wowing an audience, few can touch Frederic Edwin Church, the grand master 19th century Hudson River School painter whose jaw-dropping landscape panoramas rank among the nation's great cultural icons. Church's paintings were big on view -- really big on view -- with cinematic showstoppers like "Heart...

Miami in December is a great place to gorge on art and design -- and last month's Art Basel Miami Beach, Design Miami, and satellite art fairs such as Pulse and Nada, did not disappoint. Along with these temporary/seasonal events, there are...

Here's a game I like to play. Try to find decent criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design, particularly regarding public space, in any of the major US dailies. Go ahead... I'll wait why you think about that.

Actually it's no game... it's a problem, especially considering the role that...

Landscape architecture has become very fashionable... to architects. Moreover, its co-option and absorption into architectural practices has resulted in a revealing turf war with Andrés Duany as a vocal protagonist. He's the Princeton-trained architect who, as a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, adopted...

The face of US Post War urban planning was irrevocably changed with the pedestrian mall -- among the earliest, Fresno, California's Fulton Mall in 1964. This pioneering attempt at revitalizing a city's center was one of more than 200 urban pedestrian malls constructed in North America from 1959...

The renaissance of U.S. urban centers is playing out in starkly different ways. While Detroit is contemplating a shrinking of that city through wholesale demolition of historic neighborhoods, Louisville, Kentucky has opted for a very different approach. It has taken time, resources and most importantly, the dogged persistence of optimists,...

Overdevelopment is doing to cultural landscapes what excessive plastic surgery has done to... well, I won't name names. But I will say after spending two weeks in the Hamptons, I can point to egregious examples of both.

OK, that was a gratuitous opener, but there's a method to my...

The pioneering Modernist landscape architect Thomas Church once wittily characterized the relationship and perception of landscape architecture to architecture as "parsley around the roast" -- implying second-class status for both landscape architecture and parsley. That's one of the reasons I founded The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF)...