Major international landscape architecture prize named after Vancouver's Cornelia Hahn Oberlander
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2019 04:00:14 +0000
Vancouverite Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is being recognized as one of the world’s great landscape architects by having a major international award named after her.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation is naming its new international landscape architecture award the Oberlander Prize.
The award will be conferred biennially starting in 2021, and is described as the first and only international landscape architectural prize that includes a $100,000 US award.
Oberlander, 98, said Charles A. Birnbaum, president and CEO of the foundation, visited her at home in Vancouver on July 1 to tell her that the award would be named after her.
“I told him: ‘I am overwhelmed and smitten,’” she said.
Oberlander went on to say that she hoped the award would spur landscape architects to be inventive and generate new ideas to deal with environmental, social and ecological challenges.
“Landscape architects are a combination of artists, designers, choreographers, and scientists; they must also be leaders, especially in dealing with the effects of climate change.”
Oberlander has been a landscape architect for more than 70 years. Some of her major international projects have included the Canadian Chancery in Washington, DC; the New York Times building courtyard (with HMWhite); and the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.
In Vancouver, her projects include the Museum of Anthropology at the University of B.C., Robson Square, and the new publicly-accessible rooftop garden at the Vancouver Public Library Central Branch.
Workers add finishing touches to Vancouver Public Library’s rooftop garden in Sept. 2018.
Birnbaum said the foundation began talking about a major international landscape architecture award five years ago to address issues such as the role of landscape architecture in combating climate change, and concerns about threats to the survival of existing works of landscape architecture.
The foundation wanted to create a prize that would one day become as influential as the Pritzker Prize, one of the world’s leading architecture awards which also includes US$100,000 prize money.
Birnbaum said Oberlander’s accomplishments include not only her individual projects such as Robson Square, but also her work in playgrounds and green roofs. He said her career was “inspiring and trail-blazing,” and embodied the prize’s criteria of “creativity, courage and vision.”
“We felt it was important we lead by example and name the prize for someone who is emblematic of the philosophy and ethos behind its creation — someone whose work reflects not only the importance of landscape architecture but also its practice as both an art and a science,” he said.
Oberlander was born in a Jewish family in Muelheim-Ruhr, Germany, and grew up in Berlin. Her mother, Beate Hahn, was a horticulturist while her father was an engineer who died in an avalanche in 1933 while skiing in Switzerland.
In 1939, Beate Hahn fled the Nazi regime in Germany and moved her family to the U.S. and settled on a farm in New Hampshire.
Cornelia was educated at Smith College at Harvard. She met Peter Oberlander while on a picnic at Walden Pond. In 1953, the couple moved to Vancouver and lived in a house that Peter, an architect and planner, designed on the edge of a ravine.
In a 2001 profile of Cornelia Oberlander in The Vancouver Sun, Daphne Bramham said their garden included a high hemlock hedge and pine-covered berm.
“Layered under the trees are rhododendrons, azaleas, mosses, ferns, periwinkle, lily of the valley and occasional clumps of wild grasses,” Bramham wrote.
“The back garden is the ravine, which is completely natural except for a couple of rhododendrons planted close to the house.”
Oberlander said the garden was a prototype for the 21st century because it required little water and maintenance but provided maximum privacy and nature.
One of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s landscape architecture designs is the Cloister Garden at Cathedral Place. Photo: Glenn Baglo/Vancouver Sun
Eva Matsuzaki is an architect, friend and working colleague. She also contributed to the fundraising campaign to endow the Oberlander Prize.
Matsuzaki said she first met Oberlander in 1974 or 1975 when they worked together on Robson Square. They also worked on other projects, including the sustainable design of UBC’s C.K. Choi Building.
Matsuzaki said she couldn’t emphasize enough how well Oberlander worked in a team.
“Whenever I worked with Cornelia, I found that she tried to integrate what she was doing with the total project,” she said.
She said instead of a formula Oberlander applies from one project to another, she has guiding principles she follows, such as being environmentally responsible.
When they worked together, Matsuzaki said they followed something called the Three P’s: patience, persistence, and professionalism.
“Whenever we got frustrated, we’d say: ‘Remember the Three P’s: be patient, this will take a while, hang in there and don’t give up, but still keep it professional. That was kind of our motto.’”
The official announcement of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize was scheduled for Oct. 1 at the consulate general of Canada in New York.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation is a non-profit education and advocacy group based in Washington, DC.
In 2010, Governor General Michaelle Jean is shown with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander after she received the Officer of the Order of Canada at Rideau Hall.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander in her own words:
• “You can’t pick out my gardens. I think myself into a person’s needs and wishes. I have to know how the outside space is being used. Then I work with a concept and the concepts are driven by the idea that people want to be surrounded by nature . . . it is in our genes.”
— from a profile as she worked on the design of roof garden at the Canadian embassy in Berlin, The Vancouver Sun, May 21, 2001
• “There’s no frou-frou here.”
— from a story about her design for Jim Everett Memorial Park on University Boulevard, The Vancouver Sun, June, 21, 2002
• “People haven’t realized that they have to replace the square footage the building sits on. We must replace the biomass in our cities.”
— from a story on the importance of green roofs after being hired along with Elizabeth Whitelaw and Eva Matsuzaki to write a federal introductory manual for greening roofs, The Vancouver Sun, Aug. 13, 2002
CLICK HERE to report a typo.
Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com