Leslie Mandelson Freudenheim

Leslie Mandelson Freudenheim (1941- ) has also published as Leslie M. Freudenheim and Leslie Freudenheim. She was brought up in Piedmont, CA until she attended Smith College in MA. After college she worked at the Jewish Museum where she got her first job and her husband Tom. At the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU she studied Romanesque and Gothic. When she & Tom returned to CA she interrupted work on her Ph.D. in Romanesque to write her first book (co-authored with Elisabeth Sussman): “Building with Nature, Roots of the San Francisco Bay Region Style.” In 1971 she and Tom moved to Baltimore where she gave birth to Sascha and Adam between writing a weekly column on Modern Architecture, Historic Preservation and City Planning for the Evening Sun and teaching architectural history at Goucher College. Sascha now works in NYC for Resnicow Schroeder Associates (RSA) helping non-profits with board development, strategic planning, public relations and more. Adam lives in London and owns Pushkin Press, which publishes literature and children’s books with an emphasis on beautiful books as well as ebooks. When “Building with Nature, Roots of the San Francisco Bay Region Style” was published in 1974 it sold 6,000 copies. In 1982, having moved to Washington, D.C. Freudenheim assisted with “Capital Drawings: Architectural Designs for Washington, D.C., from the Library of Congress.” She published “Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Home” in 2005 (a more in depth examination of the Arts & Crafts Movement’s American origins and the cult of William Morris in the S.F. Bay Area). This book was also published by Gibbs Smith. The hard cover has sold over 5,000 copies and is now out on Kindle. In 2007 she was named a Library Laureate of the San Francisco Public Library. She has delivered more than 28 lectures including at the Buffalo and San Francisco Museums of Fine Arts and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While living in Berlin Freudenheim published on museum issues in various newspapers and on Frank Gehry’s DG Bank building (the so-called “whale”) in Die Welt, The New Berlin section. While in London 2001-2003 she helped research, catalog and select work for “Rare 20th Century Propaganda Posters” and then located photographs used in the Victoria and Albert’s major Art Deco exhibition “Art Deco 1910-1939.” Freudenheim currently lives in Manhattan where she advocates for renewable energy including Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) from organic waste (“garbage into gold”) and opposes Fracked Natural Gas (FNG) which unless further regulated will continue to cause earthquakes and may poison our water. She also volunteers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Noticing that there is no short biography on Frank Lloyd Wright that is both well researched and enticing she wrote one (co-authored with Pia Abate). The pair will soon self-publish “Frank Lloyd Wright: The Man who Played with Blocks, A Short Biography for Children of All Ages.”