Achva Benzinberg Stein

“The world is on loan to us, and we should return it in good condition. It’s not just for us. It’s for everybody.”

Stein grew up in Israel just outside Tel Aviv. She came to the United States in 1965 to attend the University of California, Berkeley where she earned a BA in Landscape Architecture. While studying at UC-Berkeley, she was a part of a group of landscape architecture students who opened a small office near campus to help the community do what it wanted to do; resulting in community gardens, parks and other amenities. After completing her undergraduate degree, Stein worked as a parks designer in the public works department in San Francisco serving as the shop steward for the union local that covered about 25 parks designers. Berkeley was also where she met her husband David Stein, an urban and regional planner. She went on to earn an MA in Landscape Architecture from MIT and Harvard University.

A practicing Landscape Architect and educator, Stein was a founding principal of the landscape architecture and design firm Benzinberg Stein Associates. Stein was the Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at North Carolina State University (2000–2005), founding director of the Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture, serving as Chair (2005-2013). She also served as director of the City College Architectural Center. A Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, her design work often focused on ensuring that human-built structures respond to and do not dominate the natural environment. She also focused on working with communities to create community-sensitive designs. She and Norman Millar used Windows of Opportunity, a program they created in Los Angeles in which , vacant areas such as parking lots and former industrial spaces become play spaces, non-food urban gardens, and solar fields. Communities used the program to create landscapes that would directly meet their needs. For her work, she received the American Society of Landscape Architect's Community Service Award in 2010.

Another major part of Stein's academic work is research on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean landscape design. This led to her book Morocco: Courtyards and Gardens. Because of her expertise she was invited to join the team putting together New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s "New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia" in 2011. Her role was primarily focused on directing construction of a fourteenth-century Moroccan courtyard inside the museum.[1] She also has studied the role of sacred trees in the landscapes of Northern Israel's historic shrines and proposed methods for their preservation.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achva_Benzinberg_Stein Accessed 12/28/2023 https://www.asla.org/uploadedFiles/Achva%20Stein,%20FASLA.pdf