OAKLAND, CA, April 03, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Randolph Langenbach with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Mr. Langenbach celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Mr. Langenbach has been an independent, international consultant in heritage preservation, and building construction, for over 20 years. Boasting over 45 years of expertise in the field of building conservation and construction technology, he is a specialist in earthquake retrofit of historic structures, conservation of masonry buildings, building code compliance issues, post-disaster damage assessment and repair, and the development of innovative strategies for cost-effective rehabilitation. He has also become recognized for his historic preservation documentation and his art as a photographer. From the early 1990's to the mid-2000's, he served as senior analyst in the Response and Recovery Division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Washington. Prior to that, Mr. Langenbach served as an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.
Early in his career, while Mr. Langenbach was still an undergraduate at Harvard College, his work as a photographer and preservation activist working to save 19th century New England textile mills led to publications in Life Magazine, Fortune Magazine, Time Magazine, and the Boston Globe. He later produced a major exhibition focused on the Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H. at the Currier Gallery of Art, with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. This was followed with a photographic exhibition at Boston City Hall. Although 'Urban Renewal' in the 1960's and '70's caused the loss of the canals and many mills in Manchester, Langenbach's work contributed to the establishment of the National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, and when his documentary photography expanded to the mill towns in the north of England and was published and shown in a series of exhibitions at the RIBA in London and Cartwright Hall Museum in Bradford, England by SAVE Britain's Heritage, his work helped to reverse the British Government's plans to demolish many of the historic mills there.
More recently, beginning with an Indo-American Exchange Fellowship in 1981, Mr. Langenbach's work became focused on buildings of traditional construction in Kashmir, India. Twenty-five years later, these same buildings demonstrated the earthquake resilience that Langenbach had predicted when the 2005 Kashmir earthquake struck both Pakistan and India. Following that earthquake, Langenbach wrote and illustrated the book "Don't Tear It Down! Preserving the Earthquake Resistant Vernacular Architecture of Kashmir" that was published by UNESCO in New Delhi in 2009.
After his early work in Kashmir, Langenbach's research and documentation of masonry buildings subject to earthquakes extended to Gujarat, in India, and to what was then Yugoslavia which now includes Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia. His work has also focused on Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Peru, as well as Bhutan, Nepal, and Japan. In Nepal, he and his work were featured in the PBS NOVA Science documentary "Himalayan Megaquake" in 2016. Throughout the last two decades, he has excelled as a consultant regarding this subject to UNESCO in Turkey, Georgia, India and Iran, to the World Monuments Fund in Iran and Haiti, UN-HABITAT in Pakistan (after both the 2005 earthquake and the 2010 floods), and to the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Afghanistan. During these assignments, Mr. Langenbach documented the damage to historical structures in India from the 2001 Bhuj (Gujarat) earthquake, the 2002 Tbilisi earthquake in Georgia, the 2003 Bam earthquake in Iran and the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir. In his home city of Oakland, California, Mr. Langenbach served as Chair of a Post Loma-Prieta Earthquake Committee that worked with the Building Department of the City of Oakland on oversight of earthquake damage repairs to preserve buildings in the city center.
Mr. Langenbach was responsible for the invention of the "Damped-Sway Foundation" System, which is a form of base-isolation for earthquake resistance in structures. He also completed the initial proposal of what he has named "Armature Crosswalls," which are now the subject of an engineering research project based in both Italy and Turkey. This concept is focused on converting what usually have been non-engineered masonry infill walls in reinforced concrete frame structures, by including them in the engineering design of multi-story moment frame structures that often have been vulnerable to collapse in earthquakes. Armature Crosswalls involve the installation of a subframe (the 'armature') that subdivides these infill walls so that they are less stiff and brittle, so they can work effectively as dampers that dissipate energy without collapsing when the building is forced to sway in an earthquake. Langenbach has also invented what he has named the "Gabion Bands" technology designed to improve the safety of reconstructed rural stone-with-mud-mortar homes in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake. In 2016, Mr. Langenbach's technology was featured on the PBS television science documentary program NOVA.
An invited keynote and plenary speaker at over 50 conferences and universities around the world, Mr. Langenbach has given lectures in countries located in every continent on Earth, with the exception of Antarctica. These keynote addresses included ones at the World Conference on Timber Engineering in Quebec City in 2014, the Third U.N. World Conference on Disaster Risk Management in Japan in 2015, the Structural Engineer's World Congress in Istanbul, Turkey, 2019, and two engineering conferences in Karachi, Pakistan, 2019. He was a guest lecturer of architecture at the University of Calabria, the University of Pescara, and the University of Trento, and likewise parlayed his knowledge of structural engineering and masonry construction at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and at the California campus of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Lectures were focused on both traditional timber and masonry construction, and on reinforced concrete construction in earthquake areas. Furthermore, Mr. Langenbach served as a visiting professor at the University of Brescia, for which he taught an intensive, 20-hour course on traditional methods of earthquake-resistant construction found in different countries and regions of the world.
Over the past 40 years, Mr. Langenbach has authored, co-authored and served as the photographer of several books, as well as many scholarly articles on historic building conservation. His groundbreaking work on the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, New Hampshire, resulted in a series of exhibitions and the book, "Amoskeag, Life and Work in an American Factory City," which was co-authored with Professor Tamara Hareven and published in 1978. The book has since remained in continuous print for more than 35 years. Also published in 1978, was the book "A Future from the Past, The Case for the Conservation and Reuse of Old Buildings in Industrial Cities," published by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and "Satanic Mills, The Conservation of the Pennine Textile Mills" published in Britain by the British preservation group, SAVE Britain's Heritage, for which he as photographer and Co-author. In 2009, UNESCO published his book "Don't Tear It Down! Preserving the Earthquake Resistant Vernacular Architecture of Kashmir." More recently, Mr. Langenbach was the author, photographer, and book designer of the book "ROME WAS! The Eternal City from Piranesi to the Present" published in 2019 by ORO Editions. He also produced and directed a short film on the same subject. This film was recognized with an award for "Best Animation" at a London Film Festival.
Mr. Langenbach received a Bachelor of Arts with cum laude honors from Harvard University in 1968. He later acquired a diploma in conservation from the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies in York, England, in 1977 and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University's graduate school of design in 1981. Aligned with numerous civic organizations, Mr. Langenbach is an avid member and former Board Member of the U.S./International Council on Monuments and Sites (US/ICOMOS and he also has served for years on various scientific committees of the International ICOMOS organization that works with UNESCO around the world to conserve historic structures. Mr. Langenbach is also a member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and in the past has been a member of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and the Association for Preservation Technology (APT) and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
While attending college, Mr. Langenbach won the David McCord Book Prize from Harvard University in 1968 in honor of his documentary and preservation advocacy work on New England mill towns. He later secured several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities for his early work in photography and documentation. His notable awards include Annual Conservation Award from the Victorian Society in America in 1975, the Oliver Torrey Fuller Award from the Association for Preservation Technology in 1990, and a Meritorious Service Award in 1996 and Director's Award from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1999. In 2002, he received a National Endowment for the Arts "Rome Prize" fellowship in historical preservation at the American Academy in Rome between 2002 and 2003. In that same year, Mr. Langenbach received a concurrent Fellowship Award from the International Center for the Study of Preservation and Conservation of Cultural Property in Rome (ICCROM).
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