LALH Advisers

George W. Curry, FASLA, is professor emeritus of landscape architecture, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, State University of New York. Over the past two decades, he has been involved with a variety of preservation activities. He was a member and chair of the Syracuse Landmark Preservation Board for thirteen years. He is a general partner in three multiple-use, tax act rehabilitation projects in downtown Syracuse. Since 1991, he has been project director of a number of cultural landscape reports under a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Curry holds a BA in economics and a BS in landscape architecture from Michigan State University, as well as an MLA from the University of Illinois.

Robert E. Grese, FASLA, is professor of landscape architecture and Theodore Roosevelt Chair of Ecosystem Management at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Grese also serves as director of the university’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum. His work has included the restoration of prairie and savanna habitat, social research into the benefits of volunteer stewardship efforts, and programs that connect children with nature, as well as studies of early landscape architects, including Ossian Cole Simonds and Jens Jensen, who focused on conservation and used native vegetation in their designs. He is author of Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Parks and Garden and The Native Landscape Reader, a compilation of writings about land conservation and stewardship from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grese holds a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Georgia and an MSLA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Kenneth I. Helphand, FASLA, is professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon where he has taught courses in landscape history, theory, and design since 1974. He is the author of Lawrence Halprin, the third volume in the LALH series Masters of Modern Landscape Design; Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape; Yard Street Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space (coauthor); Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture & the Making of Modern Israel; and Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. Helphand is an honorary member of the Israel Association of Landscape Architects, served as editor of Landscape Journal (1994–2002), and is former chair of the Senior Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks.

Cheryl Hurley served as president and CEO of the Library of America from its inception in 1979 to her retirement in 2018. Like LALH, Library of America is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to cultural preservation. LOA publishes America’s greatest writing—literary and historical—in authoritative new editions and provides resources for readers to explore this rich living legacy, from Thomas Jefferson and James Baldwin to Frederick Law Olmsted, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry. Nearly 400 LOA editions have been issued to date, championing America’s best writers from all periods and genres. Hurley has served on the boards of the American Antiquarian Society, the Samuel Kress Foundation, the French Institute/Alliance Française, and committees at book-related institutions, such as the Morgan Library, the Grolier Club, and the American Trust for the British Library. She has degrees in French from Ohio University, the University of Lyon, France, and the University of Michigan. She and her husband live in New York.

Francis R. Kowsky, FSAH, is SUNY distinguished professor emeritus at Buffalo State College. He has written numerous articles on nineteenth-century American architects, including A. J. Davis, Frederick Clarke Withers, and H. H. Richardson. Kowsky has a long-standing interest in the early years of the American park movement and the roles that Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Calvert Vaux played in it. The New York Times called his book Country Park and City: The Life and Architecture of Calvert Vaux “a handsome effort to rescue from comparative oblivion the architect who shared—sometimes more than equally—with Frederick Law Olmsted in the design of Central Park and other New York amenities.” His LALH book The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System examines the celebrated urban park plan the designers of Central Park created for Buffalo in 1868–1870 and the thirty-year association of Olmsted and his firm with that Great Lakes city. Kowsky is a former member of the New York State Board for Historic Preservation and has prepared numerous nominations for the National Register of Historic Places.

Witold Rybczynski, FAIA, Hon. ASLA, studied architecture at McGill University in Montreal, where he also taught; he is currently the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor Emeritus of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. His architectural experience has included designing and building houses as a registered architect, as well as researching low-cost housing, for which he received a 1991 Progressive Architecture award. In 1993, he was made an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and he has received honorary doctorates from McGill University and the University of Western Ontario. In 2007, he received the Vincent Scully Prize, the Seaside Prize, and the Institute Collaborative Honors from the AIA. He served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. He was architecture critic for the online magazine Slate. He has written twelve books on subjects as varied as the evolution of comfort, a history of the weekend, American urbanism, and the search for the origins of the screwdriver. His biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a Christopher Award, and a Philadelphia Athenæum literary award. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times, and he has written for the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

Robert A.M. Stern, FAIA, is a practicing architect, teacher, and writer. He received the AIA New York Chapter’s Medal of Honor in 1984 and the Chapter’s President’s Award in 2001. He received the Athena Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Board of Directors’ Honor from the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America in 2007. As founder and senior partner of Robert A. M. Stern Architects, he personally directs the design of each of the firm’s projects.

In addition to monographs on the firm’s work, Stern has written or coauthored numerous books including Pride of Place: Building the American Dream; Modern Classicism; a series on architecture and urbanism in New York City (New York 1900; New York 1930; New York 1960; New York 1880; and New York 2000); Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City; Pedagogy and Place: 100 Years of Architecture Education at Yale; and most recently, The New Residential Colleges and Yale: A Conversation Across Time. 

William H. Tishler, FASLA, is a professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There his teaching, research, and service have focused on historic preservation, landscape architectural history, vernacular architecture, and preservation issues relating to cultural landscapes of the upper Midwest. He was elected to the UW Teaching Academy, a group of one hundred of the university’s best teachers, and in 1998, he received an award for Teaching Excellence from the National Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. A graduate of UW Madison and Harvard University, he has been a Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, an Attingham Fellow in England, and Horace Cleveland Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota. He has lectured widely in America, Europe, and Asia and written more than 165 publications, including the award-winning American Landscape Architecture: Designers and Places; Midwestern Landscape Architecture; and Wisconsin’s Emerald Treasure: A History of Peninsula State Park. His documentary film, Jens Jensen: A Natural History, has won Telly and ASLA awards, and a Crystal Award of Excellence from the National Communicator Awards Program. He also has served as chair of Wisconsin’s Historic Preservation Review Board and is an advisor emeritus of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Suzanne L. Turner, FASLA, is a professor emerita of the School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University and principal of Suzanne Turner Associates, a firm specializing in cultural resource history and management, community preservation planning, and landscape design. Turner has a long-standing interest in the preservation and interpretation of historic and cultural landscapes. Among her projects are Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, the Hermann-Grima House in New Orleans, Bayou Bend Gardens, Rienzi in Houston, and Drayton Hall near Charleston (with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates). She has consulted on historic landscape projects in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Illinois and contributed to many books. She is the coauthor of The Gardens of Louisiana: Places of Work and Wonder and editor of The Garden Diary of Martha Turnbull, Mistress of Rosedown Plantation.

Bruce Wilcox graduated from Harvard College in 1969. He then embarked on a career in book publishing, including seven years as an editor at the University of Washington Press and thirty-two years as director of the University of Massachusetts Press, before retiring in 2014. Over the course of his career he assisted in the publication of more than 1,200 books, ranging across the humanities and social sciences. He also was active in the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), serving two terms on the Board of Directors and one term as president. On behalf of the AAUP he met with scholarly publishers in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania (1977); China (1985); Estonia and the Czech Republic (1992); and Colombia (1997). He has been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, judging book proposals, and served on the Board of Directors of The Massachusetts Review (1987-2012) and the Journal of Scholarly Publishing (1992-2009). He grew up in Cambridge and now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.