{"id":15351,"date":"2018-04-16T15:12:25","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T20:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=15351"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:12:25","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T20:12:25","slug":"healing-a-sick-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/04\/16\/healing-a-sick-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Healing A Sick Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

Architects don’t have to just design buildings. Consider the goals of pioneering architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, now 96, profiled<\/a> in Wallpaper*<\/strong><\/em>, 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:<\/p>\n

But Vancouver today has come a long way from the heady days of the 1970s, when the building blocks for Vancouverism \u2013 the forward-thinking green city model that became the darling buzzword for international urbanists in the 1990s \u2013 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\u2019s 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. \u2018Beauty is important,\u2019 she affirms. \u2018It unites people and makes something meaningful to the user.\u2019<\/p>\n

She ultimately sees her calling as a kind of healing art, and like the concept of \u2018invisible mending\u2019 expressed in her Inuvik school in the Northwest Territories, which reintroduced native plantings after nurturing them in nurseries, she also helps to heal cities. \u2018My design is therapeutic for busy people in the city who use only electronic devices,\u2019 she pronounces. \u2018Just look out at my garden. You can\u2019t even see the street. Isn\u2019t it peaceful?\u2019 And with that, Oberlander is off to preach her gospel of enlightened urban design to City Hall, where the mayor\u2019s office would do well to pay heed to the wise landscape architect who helped build a city that still dreams of being truly green.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Or maybe I’m just all wet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15352,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15351\/revisions\/15352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}