Architects don’t have to just design buildings. Consider the goals of pioneering architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, now 96, profiled in Wallpaper*, who continues to work on healing the sick of Vancouver – which appears to be basically everyone in the city, and, by extension, all city dwellers:
But Vancouver today has come a long way from the heady days of the 1970s, when the building blocks for Vancouverism – the forward-thinking green city model that became the darling buzzword for international urbanists in the 1990s – were formed. Vancouver in 2018 is in the grips of a housing crisis, and increasingly an ecological one. Oberlander has used the $50,000 she won from the 2015 Margolese National Design for Living Prize to fund a study on how overdevelopment, lack of affordable housing and dwindling green spaces affect people’s mental and physical health. In spite of several public lectures on the topic, City Hall, she says, has yet to respond. But Oberlander remains a true believer in the power of landscape architecture to save the world, and sees an innate connection between social justice and good design. ‘Beauty is important,’ she affirms. ‘It unites people and makes something meaningful to the user.’
She ultimately sees her calling as a kind of healing art, and like the concept of ‘invisible mending’ expressed in her Inuvik school in the Northwest Territories, which reintroduced native plantings after nurturing them in nurseries, she also helps to heal cities. ‘My design is therapeutic for busy people in the city who use only electronic devices,’ she pronounces. ‘Just look out at my garden. You can’t even see the street. Isn’t it peaceful?’ And with that, Oberlander is off to preach her gospel of enlightened urban design to City Hall, where the mayor’s office would do well to pay heed to the wise landscape architect who helped build a city that still dreams of being truly green.
I think her type of landscape architecture appeals to our evolutionary brains, which did not evolve in stone and glass buildings, but rather in natural surroundings. I might presume the brain must endure extra processing as it encounters the smells and sights of rectangular bricks and that sort of thing.
Or maybe I’m just all wet.
