Charles Birnbaum is the Founder and President of the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Prior to joining TCLF, Birnbaum spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative and a decade in private practice with a focus on landscape preservation and urban design. His most recent projects include the award-winning online series, Cultural Landscapes as Classrooms, and editing 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 now Pioneers II due out in 2009. In 1995, the ASLA awarded the Initiative the President's Award of Excellence and in 1996 inducted Birnbaum as a Fellow of the Society. Birnbaum served as a Loeb Fellow in 1998 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design during which time he founded TCLF. Birnbaum was awarded the Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and spent the spring and summer of that year at the American Academy in Rome. Most recently, he was the 2007 recipient of the ASLA LaGasse Medal.

Artist Statement: Larry Halprin has been painting views similar to this one looking south at Sea Ranch since the early 1960s. Sea Ranch for Larry became the place where he tested many of his foundational ideas on the importance of place, and it was there that he linked the character of natural form to the character of built form. This photograph was taken in March 2008 during a weekend visit with him and his wife Anna.