Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape

Introduction

introduction This account of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s life work also tells a story of modern landscape architecture. Both a biography and a history, I chronicle Oberlander’s career as it plays out ahead and alongside the profession ’s unfolding from World War II to the present in North America. Most people know Oberlander for her award-winning rooftop landscapes and her unwavering promotion of green design, which show no grey patches of ambiguity . But lesser known is that Oberlander has been steadily practicing landscape architecture since 1947. This fact is not always evident when meeting her, for she exudes both the possibilities of youth and the hard-won wisdom that comes with time. The interplay of history and biography has reciprocal benefits. By situating Oberlander’s projects within the historical context of modern landscape architecture ’s formation, I aim to reveal the systems of beliefs that made them possible, and how in many instances she advanced these beliefs to transform the field. Given that Oberlander’s practice has now spanned more than half a century, her oeuvre provides a fertile opportunity for understanding modern landscape architecture. Moreover, she has always maintained that her work “addresses the needs of the times,”¹ and as society’s needs have shifted and expanded with time, so too has her career, demonstrating that history conveys human agency—the choices an individual makes—as well as circumstance— the conditions shaping decisions and events. Certainly for Oberlander this is an appropriate way of accounting for her work. She has never viewed herself as the lone artist who is set apart from the world and struggling against it. On the Herrington_final.indb 1 Herrington_final.indb 1 10/17/13 10:04 AM 10/17/13 10:04 AM 2 | cornelia hahn oberlander contrary, in talking with Oberlander today you get the sense she is completely aware of the exigencies of the present and of planning for the future. Likewise, biography contributes to a historical examination. The historian Joseph Ellis describes the important contributions made by biography to history , positing that biography centers the historical quest by giving “a chorus to the cacophony of historical facts” as “it permits us to clothe generalization with palpable and textured evidence.”² Without a doubt Oberlander’s life story has intersected with pivotal moments of the modern period, so her story has much to reveal. Born in Germany in 1921, she experienced as a child the ferment of Weimar art and architecture. She later witnessed the rise of National Socialism. In 1938 Oberlander escaped Nazi persecution with her mother and sister, eventually settling in the United States. After graduating from Smith College’s integrated program of architecture and landscape architecture, she was admitted into the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University in the second cohort of full-time students to include women since the school’s inception. Exposed to the first wave of modern landscape architects (including Christopher Tunnard, Lester Collins, and Walter Chambers, as well as the former Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer), Oberlander participated in some of the earliest experiments in modern design pedagogy in North America . This educational experience stressed abstraction, the social obligations of design, and the importance of cross-disciplinary collaborations, ideals she would continue to develop throughout her career. After graduation she worked in Philadelphia for the Citizens’ Council on City Planning (CCCP), helping to spearhead direct community involvement in the creation of parks and community gardens. She was also deeply influenced by Dan Kiley, whom she assisted in designing public housing with architects Louis Kahn and Oskar Stonorov in the 1950s. This housing was distinguished by a new building typology for the city: a combination of two- and three-story structures and towers set within extensive shared open spaces, a configuration that posed both opportunities and challenges. In 1953 she married the architect and planner H. Peter Oberlander and moved to Vancouver, where they both influenced the development of the city and their professions, raised a family, and maintained a passionate and intellectual union that lasted until Peter’s death in 2008. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a growing appetite for modern design in this relatively young West Coast city, so her move was both well placed and well timed. As one of Herrington_final.indb 2 Herrington_final.indb 2 10/17/13 10:04 AM 10/17/13 10:04 AM introduction | 3...