Sculpting the Earth

Exhibition profiles legendary landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

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Internationally recognized as one of the most important landscape architects of the 20th century, 100-year-old Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is the subject of an honorific retrospective at the West Vancouver Art Museum until March 13. 

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Genius Loci is a co-venture with the Art Gallery of Alberta – it moves to Edmonton later in the year – and is comprised of sketches, plans and photographs of 12 projects Oberlander designed over her 69-year career. 

“I hope people will appreciate the complexity of the work a landscape architect does, but also appreciate the way in which a project evolves,” says Hilary Letwin, the museum's administrator, who curated the project with Alberta's Amery Calvelli. 

Genius Loci, which means the protective spirit of a place, documents Oberlander’s vision and process. She was an early advocate of rooftop gardens, starting in 1978 with her design for Vancouver's Robson Square Law Courts and later, the Vancouver Public Library. I enjoyed comparing her conceptual sketch for the library rooftop, hurried and freehand, to the detailed plan that came later. 

Other landscape plans, whether for the private Friedman garden in Vancouver or a public space, such as the Northwest Territories legislative assembly, reveal Oberlander's aesthetic – minimalist, understated and functional.

“She loves going back to simplicity,” says Letwin. “For her, minimal intervention is the best possible take in most instances. I think one of her overarching hopes is that she’s amplifying what’s already on the site.”

Not that she won’t move things around. 

“She creates these vistas,” Letwin says. “For example, she uses berms as an optical illusion. You think something is further away than it actually is.”  

Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology is a case in point. Hiding the entranceway behind a berm creates an intimate, almost private passageway. 

Says Oberlander: “Achieving a fit between the built form and the land has been my dictum.” 

Oberlander, who was born in Germany and moved to the United States in 1939, studied at Smith College and Harvard University, both in Massachusetts. She moved to Vancouver in 1953 and began collaborating with renowned Canadian architect Arthur Erickson in the early 1970s. She has received many honours, including the Companion of the Order of Canada. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, an American non-profit organization, recently announced a US$100,000 international landscape architecture prize in her name.

Oberlander is known for her unconventional approach to children’s playgrounds. She has designed 70 of them. 

“Children don’t need manufactured playgrounds,” Oberlander once said. “What they need is a pile of sand, a pile of dirt and a pond.” Thus, when designing play sites such as the Children’s Creative Centre Playground for Expo ’67 or the North Shore Neighbourhood House Playground in 1968, she created opportunities for children to clamber over wooden bridges or crawl through logs. She’s not a fan of swings or slides.

She is, however, a fan of ecology.

“I dream of green cities with green buildings, where rural and urban activities live in harmony,” she says. “As designers, we must become leaders of teams to develop site-specific solutions in order to alleviate the ills of our environment.” 

Touring the exhibition helped me understand that landscape architecture is more than simply planting flowers to make a site look attractive. It’s about cohesion. Or, as Cavelli says, building a human connection to the environment.

“If you visit a landscape, a garden or a rooftop of Cornelia’s design, there’s an experience that one feels of feeling connected to a place,” says Cavelli. “Of being in a place.” ■ 

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Genius Loci at the West Vancouver Art Museum from Jan. 20 to March 13, 2021.

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