CORNELIA HAHN OBERLANDER

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Excerpts:

Green Roofs  May 30, 2003 Chicago

Our cities have hundreds of acres of unused and unattractive roofs representing enormous wasted opportunities for improving the quality of city life. These roofs are the greatest untapped resource for making significant positive changes to air quality, water management, biodiversity and sound absorption. By greening our roofs we can create useable urban spaces replacing the lost ground.

Conservation of 20th Century Canadian Landscapes  October 2002
ASLA Annual Meeting San Jose

In conclusion, the 20th Century has seen landscape architecture flourish and become accepted as both an art and a science. Conserving last Century’s cultural landscapes, particularly those of the last 50 years, will be a challenge - a challenge that we can and must meet if we are to save these remarkable spaces for future generations.

Perhaps Robert Bruegmann (professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois) says it best:
 “I can only hope that landscape preservationists will learn from the failures as well as the successes of architectural preservation and engage in the activity with a little less proselytizing zeal, a little more confidence in the slow process of education and consensus building, a little less desire to make the landscape conform to any single notion of how the world should be, and a great deal more curiosity about the amazingly varied landscapes that we have actually created over the years.”

Convocation Address  JUNE 5, 2002 at Simon Fraser University

Mr. Chancellor, Mr. President, Distinguished Platform Party, Fellow Graduates and Guests:

It is with a deep sense of pride and pleasure that I accept this honorary degree and the opportunity to address the Class of 2002. When my family first learned of this event they immediately asked: “How can you deliver an address without your 35mm slide show?” This question prompted me to think of celebrating your graduation and today’s World Environment Day. The day was established 30 years ago after the first United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm. It focused on the interdependence and interaction of people and their environment. One-hundred-and-eighty nations gathered to warn us, already 30 years ago, of climate changes, pollution of streams and rivers, scarcity of water, extinction of plant and animal species, and ensuing health problems on our planet.

The Art of the Possible  April 9, 2002 McGill University, Quebec

It was a bitterly cold day in January 1953. In spite of it Peter marched me up Mount Royal, the only Omstedian Park in Canada, to see the splendid unique and rugged site with its sweeping view of the entire city. It is a park with a social vision, man-made, yet natural, attesting to Olmsted’s aesthetic goal to be simple, environmentally sustainable (to use a current phrase) and serves to anchor the city to its site. This was the magic of its creator Frederick Law Olmsted who was commissioned in 1877 to lay out Mount Royal. It was completed in 1889. Olmsted was North America’s first Landscape Architect, both inventing the profession and setting it on a course of enlisting the natural landscape in mediating the onslaught of urbanization that followed his creation of New York’s Central Park.

Breaking Ground : Stepping Stones  October 10, 2001 University of Toronto

We must learn that ecology is more than just another part of design - it must be viewed holistically in terms of human relationships as well as the ‘genius loci’ or spirit of the place. If we can accept this view we will be successful as teams of architects, engineers and landscape architects, transmitting to the users a new aesthetic dimension, namely sustainable landscapes based on ecological design.

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