Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: making the modern landscape

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is one of the most important landscape architectsof the twentieth century, yet despite her lasting influence, few outside the field know her name.

Her work has been instrumental in the development of the late-twentieth-century designethic, and her early years working with architectural luminaries such as Louis Kahn and Dan Kileyprepared her to bring a truly modern-and audaciously abstract-sensibility to thelandscape design tradition.

In Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making theModern Landscape, Susan Herrington draws upon archival research, site analyses, andnumerous interviews with Oberlander and her collaborators to offer the first biography of thisadventurous and influential landscape architect.

Born in 1921, Oberlander fled Nazi Germany at theage of eighteen with her family, going on to become one of the few women to graduate from HarvardUniversity's Graduate School of Design in the late 1940s.

For six decades she has practicedsocially responsible and ecologically sensitive planning for public landscapes, including the 1970sdesign of the Robson Square landscape and its adjoining Provincial Law Courts-one ofVancouver's most famous spaces.

Herrington places Oberlander within alarger social and aesthetic context, chronicling both her personal and professional trajectory andher work in New York, Philadelphia, Vancouver, Seattle, Berlin, Toronto, and Montreal.Oberlander is a progenitor of some of the most significant currents informing landscapearchitecture today, particularly in the area of ecological focus.

In her thorough biography,Herrington draws much-deserved attention to one of the truly important figures in landscapearchitecture.