Achva Benzinberg Stein

Achva Benzinberg Stein is a landscape architect, a founding principal of the landscape architecture and design firm Benzinberg Stein Associates. She is also the founding director of the Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture at City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture.

Background and education 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 Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Architecture. She went on to earn a Master of Arts in Landscape Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Professional work Stein was the Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at North Carolina State University from 2000 to 2005. In 2005, Stein founded the Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York, and served as Chair from 2005 to 2013. She was awarded the Teacher of the Year Award at City College for the academic year 2011–2012. She and Millar used this method in Windows of Opportunity, a program they created in Los Angeles. In the program, 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. In 1995, Stein based her design for Uhuru Gardens in East Los Angeles directly on community input, including stated desires for a mini-forest, a freedom tree, outdoor instruction, a community garden, a marketplace where locals could sell produce, and an African forest area with a pond. For her work, she received the American Society of Landscape Architect's Community Service Award in 2010. Because of her research, she joined the team putting together The Metropolitan Museum of Art's "New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia" in 2011.

Major publications Morocco: Courtyards and Gardens (Monacelli Press, 2007)

"Windows of opportunity: Reprogramming residual urban space." Landscape Journal 17 (special issue, 1998): 8–11. (With Norman Millar)