2025 Oberlander Prize Jury Citation
The seven-person jury includes leading landscape architects, urban planners, architects, academics, and other experts from around the world: Jury Chair, Claire Agre, is a Partner and Cofounder of Unknown Studio Landscape Architecture & Urban Design, based in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.; Arthur Adeya is a co-founder of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) and serves as Treasurer to the KDI Kenya Board in Nairobi, Kenya; Kirsten Bauer is the Global Design Director of ASPECT Studios, an international urban design, landscape architecture, living architecture, and wayfinding design practice in Melbourne, Australia; Ellen Braae has been a full professor of landscape architecture and urbanism at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark since 2009; Margarita Jover is a Professor of Architecture at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, U.S., co-director of the dual Master of Landscape Architecture and Engineering program, and co-founder of aldayjover, architecture and landscape in Barcelona, Spain; Sameep Padora is an architect and author who was born in Chamba, Northern India, and established his eponymous Mumbai-based practice in 2007; and Dorothy Tang, PhD, is a landscape architect and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore. Oberlander Prize Curator Professor Elizabeth Mossop is Dean of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) School of Design, Architecture and Building in Australia and a landscape architect and urbanist with wide-ranging experience in both landscape design and urban planning.
The Oberlander Prize Jury Citation
In a time of rapidly developing megacities and cultural homogenization, Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), founded and led by Mario Schjetnan, is a strong voice for social engagement and environmental justice in tandem with the art of landscape architecture. Their work bridges the ethical and the aesthetic, advocating for access to nature in the city as a fundamental human right. To paraphrase scholar, writer, and teacher of landscape history J.B. Jackson, GDU’s work is history, memory, and mythology made visible. As such, the work preserves the viability of shared narratives, reinforces collective values, and recognizes the public landscape as the fundamental tissue of civic life.
With total clarity on landscape architecture's mission, GDU has designed and built vibrant public landscapes in Mexico’s diverse context for nearly fifty years. The practice is globally significant in its marriage of environmental and social concerns, delivering a body of work that shows nature and landscape to be “the spatial essence of the City.”[1]
Having delivered a broad body of work including new parks, pre-colonial sites, botanical gardens, large scale restoration, and the thoughtful management and rehabilitation of historic spaces, GDU has brought about social and ecological uplift across Mexico City and beyond. Their public works frequently engage the community in creative ways during design, including crowdsourced funding models and widespread engagement, affirmatively welcoming all walks of life, but in particular, the under-resourced citizenry of the megacity.
As a practice, GDU is acclaimed for landscapes situated in beloved and sacred historical contexts with a focus on water resources: water’s symbolic meanings, water as infrastructure, and the existential conservation of water resources in the rapid urban growth of the Mexican Central Plateau. Exemplary projects include the 300-hectare Xochilmilco Ecological Park (1988-1993), which layered interpretation, recreation, and passive spaces within the UNESCO World Heritage Site dating from the tenth century. Extending the work at Xochilmilco, GDU continued with a 3000-hectare restoration of the pre-Aztec chinampas—designed agricultural landscapes which reflect the legacy of a working commons—which is a complex undertaking of restoring a cultural landscape while designing a complex hydrologic system of navigation, sanitation, and stormwater management. Currently, Xochilmilco is one of the most cherished places for weekend recreation in Mexico City. The embarcadero, flower market, and water features which greet the public marry modernist language, local materiality, deep symbolism, and a joyful artistry.
Another exemplary project, the Bosque de Chapultepec (2003 - 2022) in Chapultepec Park, rehabilitates the layered Aztec, Spanish, and modern Mexican legacies in Mexico City’s “lungs” and oldest designated public park in the Americas. The masterful design links revitalized gardens and fountains with a forestry approach, connecting a new generation to their cultural landscapes through renewed acts of care and shared places.
GDU sees parks and public spaces as an expression of environmental justice. Linking brownfield remediation, sanitation, and stormwater upgrades to the provision of public space, GDU has completed numerous public parks that not only provide open space for marginalized communities but, more importantly, access to Mexico’s rich biodiversity—such as at El Cedazo Park in Aguascalientes (1995), San Luis Potosí Bicentennial Park (2011), Natura Garden, Bicentennial Park Azcapotzalco (2012), and La Mexicana Park (2017). These landscapes are adapted to their specific temporalities and place, showcasing designs that are the result of thoughtful contextualism, constant complexity, ecological specificity, continual care, and with a long view towards the future.
Additionally, Mario Schjetnan’s leadership in Latin America and in the building of his practice has established the field of landscape architecture in Mexico from scratch. He was a founding member of The Mexican Society of Landscape Architects in 1972, serving as President in 1985-1986. The development of GDU as a practice has enabled Mario to spread his talents and vision for the field more broadly, including in academic positions in the United States and extensive publications and writings.
GDU’s portfolio of built work delivers tangible impact and a model for delivering public landscapes as essential infrastructure in a rapidly urbanizing world—home to more than half of the world’s population. For this, and for the continued superlative quality and longevity of their work, for their focus on beauty and cultural contextualism, and for their sustained commitment to landscape as a collaborative social discipline, the jury is pleased and honored to award Mario Schjetnan and Grupo de Diseño Urbano the 2025 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.
