Charles A. Birnbaum

This book is the followup to "Pioneers of American Landscape Design," the impressive reference by Charles A. Birnbaum from his days before The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Published nine years later, Birnbaum edited it with Stephanie S. Foell, an architectural and landscape historian. The format is the same — biographical essays written by knowledgeable experts, bibliographies on each practitioner, lots of illustrations, and a handy list of publicly accessible sites in the back of the book — but it picks up chronologically where the first left off and broadens its scope to include earthwork artists, golf course architects, and "a host of others," not just landscape architects. As the cover makes pretty clear, this volume is more "modern" than the first, so it was more helpful for me when using it for research. To be honest I didn't know about this title until after finding "Pioneers" in a used bookstore, but at this point it's hard to imagine not having one without the other. That said, it's hard to see future editions being created, since websites have basically replaced encyclopedic reference books, including TCLF's own website, which assembles much of what has been published in these two books. (Update: I was wrong, as a third book was published in 2018: https://archidose.blogspot.com/2019/03/shaping-postwar-landscape_1.html)… (mer)

Before he started The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), Charles A. Birnbaum spent fifteen years as the coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative. One outcome of that role is this ambitious book carried out with Robin Karson from the Library of American Landscape History. Together the two editors put together the first encyclopedia on American landscape practitioners — 162 of them to be exact, covering roughly the 1800s and early 1900s. It's an amazing feat, but even more so considering the biographical essays are accompanied by hundreds of illustrations, 100 of them in color spreads interspersed throughout the book. Even though much of the written content is now found on the TCLF website, the book is a great all-in-one-place resource. Accompanying the essays — written by many esteemed people knowledgeable about the practitioners — are short bibliographies for further research. Back matter includes a list of sites accessible to the public and bios on the contributors, but unfortunately it omits an index. Sure, one could argue that encyclopedias don't have indexes so neither should this book, but I found myself wanting one at various times when using the book for research on writing about landscapes. I must not have been alone, though, since an index appears in the followup book, "Shaping the American Landscape: New Profiles from the Pioneers of American Landscape Design Project."… (mer)