As a schoolgirl in Germany in the late 1930s, Cornelia Hahn was told to slow down—a Jewish girl must not win the school track meet. In 1938, after a harrowing escape from the Nazis—to England by train with her mother and sister—Cornelia made a point of never, ever slowing down.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who decided at age 11 that she would be a landscape architect, became one of the most renowned and admired practitioners of our time, building a distinguished, influential, and generous-spirited career that lasted almost eight decades. She died in Vancouver, British Columbia, her adopted city, on May 22, 2021, just a few weeks short of her 100th birthday. Until her final week, she spoke by telephone about the progress (and lack of progress) of her most recent project. (more…)
On the Safe Side (Maintenance) A landscape laborer is far more likely to get hurt on the job than a landscape architect. Some firms are starting to take a harder look at their role in reducing worker risk.
Features
Small Firm, Big Leap BIM training and software costs are a significant debit for small design firms. As principals weigh the pros and cons of adoption, the competitive cost of not being “in the model” is part of the equation.
Mine, Ours As Western nations look to a postcoal future, the Lausitz region of Germany eyes turning its defunct mining pits into lakes and its industrial scrapes into tourist attractions. For now,
the contradictions are delightfully instructive.
The full table of contents for July can be found here.
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Keep an eye out here on the blog, on the LAM Facebook page, and on our Twitter feed (@landarchmag), as we’ll be posting July articles as the month rolls out.
Credits: “Mine, Ours,” Michael Dumiak; “Small Firm, Big Leap,” http://www.shutterstock.com/Italy3d; “Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, 1921–2021,” Kiku Hawkes Photography; “On the Safe Side,” SiteWorks.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, on site in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, in 2013. Photo by Anne Raver.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a recipient of the ASLA Medal, died this weekend at the age of 99, leaving behind an unparalleled legacy of designed projects and a lifelong commitment to advocacy for the profession. Born in 1921, she fled Nazi Germany in 1939 for the United States, eventually attending Smith College and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, from which she graduated in 1947. Five years later, she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, with her husband, the late architect Peter Oberlander, where they both had high-profile careers for several decades. Oberlander designed many projects internationally, but her life and work are closely linked with the Canadian cultural landscape.
As word of Oberlander’s death spread, praise for her influence and activism appeared on social media, where she was called a “visionary,” “icon,” and “legend.” Elizabeth Meyer, FASLA, who served on the Oberlander Prize Advisory Committee, tweeted, “We stand on Cornelia’s shoulders. Great talent, creative risk taker, generous mentor.” Chris Reed, FASLA, of STOSS Landscape Urbanism, agreed, saying, “Cornelia leaves a stunning legacy of work and leadership, and humanity.”
Oberlander’s landscape architecture work has been extensively published in Landscape Architecture Magazine, as well as the general and design press. A selection of articles published in LAM and available online include “Permafrost Frontier,” a profile of Oberlander’s work in the Northwest Territories; “Canadian Modern,” profiling her work in Vancouver; and “Northern Terrain,” about Canada’s National Gallery.
Among the many opportunities to learn about Oberlander’s contributions are Susan Herrington’s Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape and the recent documentary City Dreamers, which focused on four influential women designers and critics: Denise Scott Brown, Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, and Oberlander. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which conducted an oral history with Oberlander in 2008, announced in 2019 that a recently established international landscape architecture prize would be named in honor of Oberlander. The biennial prize will carry a $100,000 award as well as two years of public engagement. The Cultural Landscape Foundation has extensive information about Oberlander’s career and the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize on its website, as well as a recording of the livestreamed memorial service held on May 24, 2021.
In August, the Cultural Landscape Foundation announced that it was launching a major new international prize in landscape architecture. On Tuesday, the foundation made it official that the prize will be named for the landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, FASLA, for her “leading role in addressing environmental, ecological, and social issues and the impact of climate change.”
The Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize will be awarded every two years beginning in 2021, and will be the only prize in the profession with a $100,000 award attached. Recipients will also be the subject of events sponsored by the foundation that focus on their practice to show the development and achievements of landscape architecture. (more…)
Around a school in an arctic town, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander has made a landscape to withstand the prospect of a warming world.
This week, LAM is joining more than 250 media outlets for Covering Climate Now, flooding the zone, as it were, with climate coverage in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23. Landscape and landscape architecture are deeply implicated in the future of climate progress, or a lack of it. Over the past decade, LAM has dug into climate issues of landscape in numerous dimensions, mapping the big resource picture as well as local attempts to fend off increasingly apparent hazards of global warming—from the procurement of materials to the integrity of the food supply chain. Each day this week we’ll bring you excellent stories from recent years that follow landscape architects acting and thinking about climate change and the landscape.
FROM THE NOVEMBER 2013 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
The permafrost is melting in Inuvik, a flat delta town in the Northwest Territories, 2 degrees north of the Arctic Circle. You can see the drunken trees, leaning this way and that along the banks of the Mackenzie River. The Gwich’in and Inuvialuit—native people who make up 40 percent of the some 3,500 residents here—have to go farther out to hunt seals, because of the melting ice.
The caribou get stuck in the mud, instead of running across snow, as they migrate to their calving grounds north of Tuktoyaktuk, or Tuk, as people here say, on the coast of the Beaufort Sea. The lichen that has sustained them for millennia is getting crowded out by species that thrive in warmer temperatures.
Local people tell of landslides and collapsing banks along the Mackenzie River, or slumping—where the land simply caves in—on a road or in the forest. The pingos, or subterranean ice houses, may be melting up in Tuk, but most people have freezers anyway.
“Come, I want to show you where I sank into the permafrost that was melted,” Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, FASLA, the Canadian landscape architect, said one unseasonably cold day in July. (more…)
Since 2012, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has brought in big names in landscape architecture—Cochran, Van Valkenburgh, Galí-Izard, and more—to speak as part of its Landscape Lectures series. Each lecture is roughly an hour long and highlights the work and achievements of the speaker. The above video contains a playlist of the available lectures through the museum’s YouTube channel, starting with one of the first lectures in 2012 up through June 2015. The next lecture in the 2015–2016 series will feature Walter Hood on November 12. For more information, please click here.
