Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: A Role Model in Environmentally and Socially Conscious Landscape Architecture

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, a German-born Canadian landscape architect, was recognised as a national treasure in Canada. She was honored with the Inaugural Governor General’s Medal in Landscape Architecture in 2016 by the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA). In 2019, the Cultural Landscape Foundation established the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize in her honor. She was born in Muelheim-Ruhr, Germany in June 1921 and immigrated to the United States in late 1938. She was amongst the first female landscape architects upon graduating from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design’s Landscape Architecture Program in 1947. In 1953, with her husband H.Peter Oberlander, who set up the first city planning school in Canada at UBC, the pair moved to Vancouver.

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. Image courtesy of Province of British Columbia. Image source: https://archinect.com/news/article/150162479/cornelia-hahn-oberlander-international-landscape-architecture-prize-set-to-launch-in-2021, retrieved on 5 September 2021.

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s designs emphasized exposure to nature for its healing effect, as well as providing opportunities for social interaction in public spaces. Moreover, she recognized early on the climate change crisis and tried to mitigate its effects through her green designs. Some of her noteworthy projects include: the landscape of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver’s Robson Square Provincial Government Center and Courthouse Complex, the Canadian Chancery in Washington D.C, and the Children’s Creative Center for Expo 67 in Montreal. Unfortunately, after practicing landscape architecture for more than sixty years, she died from complications of COVID-19 in May 2021 at the age of 99 in Vancouver.

Siotu: The City That Saw It Coming

Adapted from a prompt asking for a creative story about a fictional city

In today’s global discourse, climate change is a mainstay that supersedes most other areas of conflict but has the potential to unify us as a human race. However, this conversation is not new. In fact, conversations about the effect our mass industrialization have had on the planet have been happening in academic circles for several decades. But no real municipality heeded to all of the scholarly warnings, except for the small city-state of Siotu (pronounced SEE-oh-TU). Located in the center of the Pacific Ocean, Siotu has long been a mecca for environmental enthusiasts for its harsh laws pertaining to human-caused pollution and its commitment to mitigating the effects of ongoing climate change. We are currently in a place where we, as a whole, should be transitioning from focusing on climate mitigation to focusing on climate adaptation; Siotu started this pivot over 25 years ago and has been a pioneer in experimenting with new forms of urban civilization that are adaptive to our changing climate. For one, the entirety of Siotu lives in an urbanized setting. It is a well-known fact that population density has a negative correlation with carbon footprint and Siotu takes this seriously. Also given Siotu is on an island, there has been numerous efforts to adapt to rising sea levels by raising population density at the high-points of the island and incrementally guiding water to accumulate in unhabituated areas of the island.

Nonetheless due to a great repertoire of respect for the planet, Siotu knows these measures are only temporary fixes and will not fight against the sea as the Earth runs its course. Eventually as the ocean takes more and more of their land, Siotu residents will slowly become environmental refugees until the entire island is submerged. So, what is the future of Siotu? I posit the future of this city is the amount of knowledge gained through its attempts to be a climate-adaptive civilization in a world where that was not a shared priority and proof that adapting to climate change has to be a worldwide endeavor. In this fashion, while the future of Siotu may not be physical, it will still have an impact on cities of the future.

Siotu was loosely inspired by several island cities including:

Figure 1. Malé, Maldives. Image Source: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/maldives/male

Figure 2. Isola dei Pescatori, Italy. Image Source: https://www.stresatours.com/portfolio/isola-pescatori-tour/

Figure 3. Suva, Fiji. Image Source: https://fijisun.com.fj/2021/01/30/council-to-install-more-cameras-in-suva-city/