Cornelia Oberlander

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander CC OBC, MBCSLA, FCSLA, FASLA, LL.D. (20 June 1921 – 22 May 2021) was a Canadian landscape architect.¹ During her career she contributed to the designs of many high-profile buildings in both Canada and the United States, including Robson Square and the adjoining Law Courts Complex in Vancouver, the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Chancery in Washington D.C., Vancouver's Library Square, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly Building in Yellowknife.²

Cornelia Hahn was born at Muelheim-Ruhr, Germany, the eldest of two daughters of Beate Hahn (née Jastrow) and Franz Hahn, who died in a skiing accident in 1933. Cornelia's uncle was educator Kurt Hahn, the founder of Schule Schloss Salem in Germany, Gordonstoun in Scotland, and UWC Atlantic College in Wales. Her aunt Elisabeth Jastrow, was a well-known archaeologist.

A horticulturist who wrote gardening books for children, Beate fostered in her daughter a deep love and appreciation for nature; Cornelia had her own vegetable garden at age four.³ In an interview with Mechtild Manus, Oberlander said: "At the age of eleven... I studied a mural in the artist's studio showing the river Rhine and an imaginary town. When I asked the artist about the green spaces in this mural, she told me that these were parks. When I came home, I told my mother 'I want to make parks'. From there all my education was directed towards becoming a landscape architect."⁴

The Hahns were Jewish. When Cornelia was 18, with her mother and sister Charlotte, she escaped Nazi persecution after Kristallnacht by fleeing to England. They emigrated to the United States in 1939,⁴ and settled first in New York, then in New Hampshire, where her mother created a truck farm.⁵ Cornelia attended Smith College, graduating in 1944 with a BA. She then went to the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where she studied under Walter Gropius and, in 1947, became one of first to earn a degree in Landscape Architecture.⁶ At a class picnic, she met architect Peter Oberlander. Born in Vienna, he too had fled with his family from the Nazis in 1938 and had earned a PhD in Regional planning from Harvard.² They married in 1953 and moved to Vancouver where, at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Peter became Canada's first professor of Urban and Regional Planning.¹⁷

In 1950, Oberlander was hired as a community planner with the Citizen's Council on City Planning in Philadelphia. From 1951 to 1953, she worked for architects Louis Kahn and Oscar Stonorov, and landscape architect Dan Kiley, in Philadelphia where, for the Mill Creek Public Housing Project, she designed her first playground.⁸ She worked for in Vermont then, in Vancouver, founded her own firm, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Landscape Architects. Oberlander then became interested in the modern art movement led by B. C. Binning and Ned Pratt, which combined art and architecture to address the connections between urbanism and surrounding natural settings.⁹

While she completed many private gardens, the early years of Oberlander's practice were mostly dedicated to designing playgrounds and landscapes for low-income housing projects; over the course of her career, she designed 70 playgrounds in Canada,¹⁰ including the Canadian Pavilion's Children's Creative Centre at Expo 67 in Montreal.²¹¹¹² All of her playgrounds had vegetable gardens and picnic areas; in the case of Vancouver's Skeena Terrace, she included play sculptures of her own design.¹³¹⁴ Throughout her career, she conducted significant research into pediatry and pedagogy, and children's interests and activities, and urged city planners and developers to recognize playgrounds as important sites for childhood development and to include them in new construction. She emphasized the social benefits generated by free play and independent discovery, and provided practical proposals for the formulation of new playgrounds. In 1974, she was a member of the National Task Force on Children's Play established by the Canadian Council of Child and Youth Advocates. In 2022, her research was gathered into the Concordia University publication Cornelia Hahn Oberlander on Pedagogical Playgrounds.¹⁵

She later practiced on a more commercial scale, working with architects and other professionals from various disciplines to create aesthetic solutions for challenging projects. Before beginning a project she researched it thoroughly to ensure that her innovative schemes would be practical and long-lasting. Sometimes, her innovations needed no research at all. In 1964, she discovered that, when orphaned tree logs washed up on Vancouver's shores, the city was burning them—Oberlander quickly convinced the city to keep the logs for seating and shelter, a practice which was immediately adopted and is now standard. She always approached a project from an environmental standpoint. In her Convocation Address for the acceptance of an honorary degree from Simon Fraser University she stated: "I dream of Green Cities with Green Buildings where rural and urban activities live in harmony... "Achieving a fit" between the built form and the land has been my dictum. This can only be done if all our design-related professions collaborate and thereby demonstrate co-operatively their relevance in meeting the enormous developmental challenges facing our increasingly crowded urban regions."¹⁶

Oberlander's concern for the environment and for people in general, was further exemplified by her involvement with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Mount Scopus. Oberlander and her husband, Peter, visited Israel for a congress with the International Federation of Landscape Architects in 1962. According to the Jewish Independent, the Oberlanders were in Israel to study irrigation systems, but they "fell more deeply in love with the land and its people".¹⁷ The Oberlanders engaged in and spearheaded many activities to benefit the university from 1979 on, including: setting up a Canadian Studies Program, bringing boxes of Canadian textbooks to Israel for donation to the university, developing a botanical garden, working with a team of planners to assist the community of Ashkalon in accommodating settlers from North Africa and Georgia, and advocating for the restoration of historic buildings on the campus. The Oberlanders were honored for their contributions by the Vancouver chapter of Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004 and they visited Israel many times in their philanthropic efforts.¹⁷

Oberlander received the "rare and exceptional honour" of being elected to both the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects' College of Fellows (in 1981) and the American Society of Landscape Architects' Council of Fellows (in 1992).¹⁸

In 1999–2000, she contributed her expertise to the Vancouver Art Gallery for its "Out of This Century" exhibition, guiding patrons through the selection of visual art pieces that were chosen from the permanent collection of the gallery (by Oberlander and five other Vancouverites) to reflect and represent the city art scene through the decades.¹⁹ In 2018, she completed a redesign of the National Gallery of Canada's Fred & Elizabeth Fountain Garden Court. She also had designed its predecessor.²⁰

• 1981: Fellow, Canadian Society of Landscape Architects¹⁸
• 1990: Member of the Order of Canada²¹
• 1991: Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, University of British Columbia²²
• 1992: Fellow, American Society of Landscape Architects²³
• 1992: 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada Medal¹⁰
• 1995: Allied Medal, Royal Architectural Institute of Canada¹⁰
• 1997: Honorary Member Architectural Institute of British Columbia²⁴
• 2001: Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, Ryerson University¹⁰
• 2002: Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, Smith College¹⁰
• 2004: Honoree of Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem¹⁰
• 2005: Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, Simon Fraser University¹⁰
• 2008: Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, McGill University¹⁰
• 2008: Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, Dalhousie University¹⁰
• 2009: Officer of the Order of Canada²¹
• 2011: Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award of the International Federation of Landscape Architects¹⁰
• 2012: American Society of Landscape Architects Medal²⁵
• 2014: Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, University of Calgary²⁶
• 2015: Margolese National Design for Living Prize²⁷
• 2015: One of Chatelaine Magazine's Women of the Year.²⁸
• 2016: Governor General's Medal in Landscape Architecture, Inaugural Recipient²⁹
• 2016: Member of the Order of British Columbia³⁰
• 2017: Companion of the Order of Canada¹⁰
• 2017: LAF Medal of the Landscape Architecture Foundation¹⁰
• 2018: Profiled in the 2018 documentary film, City Dreamers, alongside Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, and Denise Scott Brown, as women who shaped the world we live in.³¹
• 2021: First award of The Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize,³² created by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) to honor the works of Cornelia and her dedication to the profession of Landscape Architecture. Additionally, the TCLF named this prize in Oberlander's name to recognize her efforts to address social, environmental, and ecological issues through her design work.³³ This prize will be awarded every other year. This is the only award in the profession of Landscape Architecture that includes a $100,000.00 prize.

(List does not include residential gardens and school playgrounds.)³⁴

• Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Ecological Landscapes, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (2006)⁴²
• Canadian Megaform, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (2014-2015)⁴³
• New Ways of Living: Jewish Architects in Vancouver 1955-1975 (online), The Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia, Vancouver (2016)⁴⁴
• Bauhaus (Canada) 101, University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery, Winnipeg (2020)⁴⁵
• Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Genius Loci, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2021)⁴⁶

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  Gold Star Park, Philadelphia
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  The Peacekeeping Monument, Ottawa
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  Cherokee Village, Philadelphia
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  The Powell River Mill
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  UBC School of Architecture
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  Ottawa City Hall
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  The New York Times Building Atrium
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  Indigenous Grass Bioswales at the C.K. Choi Building
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  The Liu Institute for Global Issues
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  The Vancouver Public Library Roof Garden
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  Log Seating at Kitsilano Beach, Vancouver
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  The Laxton Evergreen Building
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  Robson Square
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  The Japanese Garden at the Bloedel Reserve
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  The Japanese Garden at the Bloedel Reserve
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  Vancouver Art Gallery
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  Simon Fraser University Mall
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  The National Gallery of Canada
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  BC Place
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  Cathedral Place Courtyard
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  The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
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  Vancouver International Airport Interior Detail