Publication

  • Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape
    Susan Herrington
    Author
    Marc Treib
    Contributor
    University of Virginia Press, 2014
  • GRANTEE
    Susan Herrington
    GRANT YEAR
    2011

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Expo '67, An Environment for Creative Play and Learning. Courtesy of Canadian Centre for Architecture, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Archives.

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander's oeuvre provides a rich opportunity for deepening our understanding of modern landscape architecture. Her story intersects with pivotal moments in the twentieth-century—her escape from Nazi Germany to the United States, her enrollment in one of the first cohorts of female landscape architecture students at Harvard University, her use of a modern design vocabulary, her participation in the design of social housing, and her ground breaking work with ecological systems. Landscapes take time to mature before they are fully appreciated, and with almost sixty years of practice, Oberlander has produced an extensive repertoire of projects. By providing high quality colored images of Oberlander's work, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape will reveal how this extraordinary landscape architect contributed to making the modern landscape.

Susan Herrington's research concerns the history and theory of designed landscapes. She has conducted research in Germany with support from the German Academic Exchange, in Cambridge as a visiting researcher at Harvard University, and as an early career scholar with the UBC Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. From 2010–11 she was a UBC Killam Faculty Fellow. She is author of On Landscapes (Routledge, 2009) and Schoolyard Park (2002). She has published articles in Architecture and Ideas, Footprint, Landscape Journal, and Landscape Research, as well as numerous chapters in books. She is professor of landscape architecture and architecture at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.