Edward Lifson

Edward Lifson has worked in Public Radio since the late 1980s. He has reported extensively on architecture, urbanism and culture, in addition to news and politics. He created and hosted a popular radio show in Chicago called "Hello Beautiful!" to explore urban architecture and design issues. Prior to that he was a correspondent for National Public Radio. In the US he covered urban affairs, politics, economics, labor and arts and culture. In 1996 he established the National Public Radio Bureau in Berlin, Germany. In Europe, Lifson covered the rebuilding of Berlin as a city and a national capital, European Union, post-Cold War politics, NATO, the launch of the euro, immigration issues, and Central Europe’s transition to democracy and capitalism. As a war correspondent he reported extensively for NPR from Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia before and during the war in Kosovo.

Lifson's work has also been heard on the BBC and CNN.

In addition to Berlin, he lived for many years in Paris, Florence, Italy and in England.

Increasingly, his journalism focuses on what makes cities work and how they can be improved. His particular interests include public space, transportation and art; street furniture, landscaping, parks, civic buildings, sustainability, housing and preservation.

He created and hosted Hello Beautiful! on Chicago Public Radio until mid-2007. It was a weekly radio program about Arts, Architecture and Culture.

A report of his on the impending auction of Mies van der Rohe's modernist masterpiece Farnsworth House on the Fox River in Plano, Illinois, caused people across America to donate money to preserve the house in its original location.

In 2007 he was a fellow in the USC/Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship in Los Angeles.

In 2008 he was a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He studyied urban planning and design, histories and theories of architecture, landscape architecture and sustainability.

In Fall 2008 he began an Annenberg Fellowship in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California to study the Specialized Journalism of Architecture.

He is working on a new national radio program about cities, architecture and design.