Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum appoints consulting curator of landscape
Charles Waldheim, principal at Urban Agency, will join Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in January 2011 as its new consulting curator of landscape. His appointment and the creation of a new position is meant to highlight and expand the importance of landscape scholarship at the museum and in the neighborhood, as well as build upon the work of the first curator of landscape, Patrick Chassé. Waldheim joins the museum about a year before the expected opening of a new wing designed by Renzo Piano. Waldheim coined the term “landscape urbanism” to describe emerging design practices at the intersection of landscape and contemporary urbanism, which is his primary research focus. He is the John E. Irving professor of landscape architecture and the current chair of the department at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. In 2006, Waldheim received the Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture from the American Academy in Rome.