City dreamer
As a recent film by director Joseph Hillel highlights the work of acclaimed landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, we revisit our profile piece dedicated to this revolutionary and inspiring designer.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander at her house in Vancouver © Chanel Blouin
City Dreamers, winner of the TVP Kultura Award at last autumn's Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival, is now available to stream in Canada and tells the story of four trailblazing women architects dedicated to shaping the cities of today and tomorrow.
Shot on location in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Philadelphia, City Dreamers features new interviews with Hahn Oberlander — as well as her contemporaries, Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel and Denise Scott Brown — and reveals archival materials that shed light on how our cities have grown from the mid-20th century to today.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, an illustrious and socially-attuned designer, has come a long way from her beginnings in Mülheim, Germany. One of the greatest landscape architects of the modern era, Hahn Oberlander was awarded the 2012 American Society of Landscape Architects Medal and was the recipient of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s 2011 Prix du XXe siècle.
Her passion for universal and sustainable design has seen her dedicate herself to everything from social housing projects with influential American architect Louis Kahn to pedestrian-friendly accessibility developments and creative playgrounds.
At the age of 99, Hahn Oberlander’s creative spirit hasn’t diminished. In recent years she used the $50,000 prize fund she was awarded by the Margolese National Design for Living Prize to launch a study into how people's health is negatively effected by a lack of affordable housing and the decline of recreational parks and public gardens. As Vancouver faces a major housing crisis, Hahn Oberlander has been praised for her willingness to challenge the status quo as a champion of change.
The Margolese Prize jury praised her landscape designs as “breathtaking, poetic, unforgettable, charged with meaning, and above all, Modernist. Her interests draw on technical, ecological, symbolic, and artistic practices, in a range of scales from the entire planet to tiny neighbourhood parks.”
Forced to flee Nazi Germany’s persecution during World War II, Hahn Oberlander’s family emigrated to America, where she went on to study at Smith College and to become one of the first women to graduate from Harvard with a degree in landscape architecture. In 1953 she moved from the East Coast of America to Canada, where she founded a small landscape architecture firm.
Hahn Oberlander’s passion for design led to her two most well-known works: Robson Square, a public plaza and a popular Vancouver landmark, and the Museum of Anthropology, a major tourist attraction known for its display of world art and culture. As part of her design process, Hahn Oberlander thoroughly researched each site, embracing new technologies to address issues of sustainability and climate change.
Today her belief that architecture and design can be seen as a form of mental healing is well-known. As an environmental advocate, she states that green spaces have a rejuvenating effect on the mind and soul. It’s telling that when asked about her work, Hahn Oberlander describes it humbly as “an evolving experiment... the art of the possible.”