Barbara Eberlein Honored at the 2026 Ball on the Square

This summer, the Friends of Rittenhouse Square marked their 50th anniversary with this year’s Ball on the Square, and honored Barbara Eberlein for her decades of work preserving and shaping the neighborhood she calls home.

The sold-out evening transformed Rittenhouse Square, William Penn’s original “greene countrie towne,” into an open-air ballroom, drawing the city’s preservation, design, and philanthropic communities together. For more than forty years, Barbara and Eberlein Design Consultants have called Rittenhouse Square home. A member of the Friends of Rittenhouse Square board since 1998 and a past chair of the Ball, she has extended that same care to the neighborhood’s public spaces as well as its private ones. Her landmark restorations, each approached with an archaeologist’s curiosity and a preservationist’s reverence, reach from the Furness Mansion and 1830 Rittenhouse Square, both steps from her door, to signature projects across the region like Ardrossan.

In accepting the honor, Barbara offered her own reflection on the quiet exchange between place and people, and gave the room, as she always does, some homework.

Barbara’s Remarks

Thank you to co-chairs Laura LaRosa and Jamie Gibbins, to an inspired board of FRS, to the gifted planners that make this magic possible, and to the inimitable June Armstrong, Executive Director of FRS.

Thank you to the inspired leaders of this organization: Laura LaRosa, Bart Blatstein, Allan Domb, Wendy Rosen, Betsy Hummel, Joe Roberts, Nancy Heinzen, Carole Shanis, and so many others.

William Penn, in 1682, knew what he was doing. Little did he know how lovingly embellished this square would become under Paul Cret’s guidance in 1913, when America awoke to the City Beautiful Movement that forever improved the health and vitality of our urban environment.

Here in Rittenhouse Square, this tapestry weaves together our buildings, our landscapes, our community, and ultimately, it creates our relationship to our city and our world.

It was Winston Churchill who said, “we shape our buildings and thereafter, they shape us.” How true. And let’s take that a step further: we shape the natural world around us, and it most certainly shapes, and nourishes, us.

I’ve had the privilege of practicing interior design from this wonderful Philadelphia base, and it’s taught me the value of crafting the way we look, the way we live, and the way we feel.

All of this underscores the critical importance of philanthropy and stewardship. Magically, it’s both the practice of philanthropy and stewardship, as well as the results, that enrich our experience as human beings and ensure the longevity of the beauty around us.

Now, no evening with me is complete without an assignment or two.

Assignment #1: Make a drawing. Make a difference. Draw your ideas for how we can enrich and enliven the Square, and share them with all of us.

Assignment #2: Get out, walk around, and look up, and discover hidden treasures in your own city, and share them with others.

Let’s celebrate the long line of history in the beauty all around us.

EDC is proud to celebrate Barbara’s recognition this year, and deeply grateful to the Friends of Rittenhouse Square for fifty years of devotion to this cherished jewel of our city.

In the Press

The magic of the evening was featured in Philadelphia Style Magazine‘s September 2026.