Vancouver landscape architecture pioneer Cornelia Oberlander dies at 99
Posted May 24, 2021 8:26 pm.
Last Updated May 24, 2021 11:03 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – The Canadian landscape architect behind Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada and Vancouver’s Robson Square has died.
Cornelia Oberlander died Sunday in Vancouver at the age of 99.
Oberlander escaped persecution in Nazi Germany when she was 18. She immigrated to the U.S. and was one of the first women to graduate from Harvard University with a landscape architecture degree.
Moving to Vancouver in the 1950s, she founded her own landscape architecture firm and went on to design such things as the visitor centre at VanDusen Botanical Garden, the rooftop garden at the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, and the famed log seating on Vancouver’s beaches.
Former City of Vancouver planner Sandy James says, “My favorite is the Museum of Anthropology, there’s a large body of water there that looks like some First Nations will paddle up at any moment with a stone pebble beach.”
Just days before she passed away, on May 18, Vancouver City Council bestowed the Freedom of the City Award on Oberlander.
James knew Oberlander for more than 40 years.
Oberlander was among giants in the caliber of her work and was always thinking of the future, James says.
“She was a person that cared deeply about the landscape and the importance of the landscape and climate change, and I think that she was the pioneer in talking to us about how to create the cities we need for the future.
“She was almost the Frank Lloyd Wright of landscape architecture. She had what we think of as fairly normal now this idea of invisible mending that whatever intervention she did in terms of landscape or design that you wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between what would naturally be there, and what is there now,” James says.
– With files from The Canadian Press
