About Mario Schjetnan and Grupo de Diseño Urbano, the 2025 Oberlander Prize Laureate
Mario Schjetnan, the founder of Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), holds an undergraduate degree in architecture from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) (1968), and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley (1970); he was awarded the Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1984) to pursue advanced environmental studies. In 1995, the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Léon awarded him an Honorary PhD in Architecture and in 2025 the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California also awarded him an Honorary PhD in Architecture.
Schjetnan belongs to a generation of landscape architects, architects, and urbanists who became aware of the environmental impact of urban development and its consequences on life, the planet, and its inhabitants. He created new theories and practices for the design of cities based on environmental knowledge, cultural memory, and consideration for the inhabitant's quality of life, well-being, and a new ethical and aesthetic relationship with the environment.
GDU has carried out projects and works of landscape architecture, urbanism, and architecture throughout Mexico, as well as in Latin America, China, the Middle East, and the United States.
Biography
Mario Schjetnan was born in Mexico City on July 7, 1944, the third of six children of Mario Schjetnan Dantán and Margarita Garduño. His family was the second Mexican-born generation descended from Paul Christian Schjetnan (1870–1945), who emigrated to Mexico from Kristiansund, Norway, around the turn of the twentieth century as a commercial attaché. By 1901 his grandfather had several businesses in Mexico City, including the Norwegian-Mexican Company, and he settled in Chapala around 1908. Among his many initiatives was the construction of the railroad from Guadalajara to Chapala, where hotels were being developed around Lake Chapala, the nation’s largest body of freshwater.
According to Spacemaker Press monograph of 2007, Mario Schjetnan, Landscape, Architecture, and Urbanism by John Beardsley, Paul Christian Schjetnan became friends with the family of Luis Barragán and met the young architect in the 1920s, when he was designing his first houses in Guadalajara. Schjetnan Dantán was also a builder and an architect with a broad residential and commercial practice who also taught architecture for four decades, from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Late in his life, his father added landscape design to his practice—with an emphasis on golf courses—and helped establish Mexico’s first undergraduate program in landscape architecture at UNAM in the mid-1980s. “Despite sharing a profession, there were stark differences between father and son. The elder Schjetnan Dantán came of age in an era when both art and architecture in Mexico were dominated by leftists—muralists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clement Orozco and architects such as Juan O’Gorman—yet he was not one of them. As a student, the younger Schjetnan Garduño would be drawn to precisely those artists and designers, and would ultimately take his first job in a public housing agency. In hindsight, Schjetnan credits his mother, Margarita Garduño, as much as his father with his scholiastic development. ‘She was the intellectual in the family.’ A graduate of UNAM with a degree in history (in the same class as Octavio Paz), she especially encouraged Schjetnan’s interest in history, literature, and the theater.”
Schjetnan studied undergraduate architecture at UNAM between 1963 and 1968. As Beardsley notes, he spent three years with Ricardo Flores, who introduced him to the work of Louis Kahn and Alvaro Sanchez, who taught him about construction. He immersed himself in Mexican modernist architecture and befriended Luis Barragan (now a revered figure in twentieth century architecture and Pritzker Prize winner, though disdained at the time by some in the architecture community because of his training as an engineer).
Along with his interest in modernist architecture, he was developing a fascination with landscape architecture, including works by Barragán in Mexico, Roberto Burle Marx in Brazil, and Lawrence Halprin in the U.S. Indeed, it was his interest in Halprin, a Brooklyn, NY, native who spent his life and career in the San Francisco Bay Area and about whom he had read in Process and Progressive Architecture, that Schjetnan enrolled at the University of California Berkeley in the fall of 1968.
Before Berkeley, he traveled to France in the summer before beginning his Berkeley studies to see works by Le Corbusier, Breuer, and Noguchi; upon arriving in Paris that June he encountered a militarized city dealing with massive student protests—“the city of lights,” he said, “was dark.” He returned to Mexico City that August at a time when hundreds of student protestors were killed by government troops.
Berkeley profoundly transformed his life, opening windows for interdisciplinary processes, ecology, and environmental design at all scales. Teachers such as Garrett Eckbo, Don Appleyard (his thesis advisor), Robert Twiss, and David Stretfield were the sources of that transformation. From Stretfield, who Schjetnan says “referred to California as the Arcadia,” and learned to “read the landscape” and to “look at the scenery of the landscapes and its textures and colors meant different ecologies.”
In addition to Appleyard, another mentor was Kevin Lynch, who “introduced me to perception of the city and a phenological concept of urban design.” Additionally, he had the opportunity to work and study with Robert Royston, one of the icons of modernism on the West Coast. His graduation in 1970 followed the first Earth Day, which grew out of the social and cultural ferment of the late 1960s, and an oil spill in 1969 off the coast of Santa Barbara, marking the onset of a broad environmental movement. In a recent interview, Schjetnan counted off the various events and interests he remembers being prevalent at the time: “the women’s movement, anti-war movement, protests, love, literature, music, and art.” According to Schjetnan, “when I came back to Mexico from Berkeley I wanted to have a revolution, to change the world.”
Initially he taught urbanism and ecology in the master’s in urbanism at UNAM. However, it was in 1972 that he realized how he could have a “revolution”; it was in housing when he became the first head of urban and housing design at INFONAVIT, a new government initiative to provide workers’ housing. He traveled extensively for the next five years and discovered that “Mexico is a mosaic of cultures. . . . For me it was like a post doctorate degree in Mexico.” During that time, “we created a series of environmental and urban design concepts different from what had been done before in housing.” He recently recalled: “We worked in 110 cities in Mexico. We built, in five years, 100,000 houses/units, and in Mexico City just about 25,000.”
With this background as a foundation, GDU was founded in 1977 by Schjetnan with architect José Luiz Pérez as his principal partner and Irma Schjetnan, and Letty Pérez, their wives, respectively. Since then, Schjetnan and GDU have designed and constructed an extensive body of works of landscape architecture, urbanism, and architecture throughout Mexico, as well as in Latin America, China, the Middle East, and the United States. GDU’s vast portfolio of projects includes a cross-section of nationally significant historic sites such as Chapultepec Forest and Park, the oldest park in the Americas, and Xochimilco Ecological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site with origins in the tenth century, and Copalita Eco-archaeological Park in Oaxaca, and new parks in reclaimed post-industrial sites, such as La Mexicana Park, a vast former quarry, and Bicentennial Park – Nature Garden on the site of the former PEMEX oil refinery in Mexico City. The firm’s portfolio currently includes parks (accounting for nearly half of their business), residential development, post-industrial sites, museums, and others. Schjetnan and GDU’s projects emphasize water sustainability, the recycling and repurposing of post-industrial sites, and the rehabilitation and improvement of urban and natural public spaces.
When asked to define what makes a GDU landscape, he recently stated: “I think, first of all, the concept of culture. The concept that the landscape is really about culture.” And, secondly, “it’s site specific.” Schjetnan also states, “if you want to develop a site or a new area, you have to start with a park.” He says, “the major question of my life is to improve livability in the poorest sections of Mexico and Latin America, to provide social justice and urban equity and to establish an urban equilibrium between the built and the unbuilt.” He believes, quite simply—and emphatically—that there is a “human right to open space.”
Mario Schjetnan has held professorships and taught design workshops at Harvard University (1994, 1998, 2005); the University of Arizona, Tucson (1999–2001); the University of California, Berkeley (2001); the University of Texas, Austin (2006); and the University of Virginia (2007, 2021) in the U.S. In Mexico, He has also held posts at UNAM (1970–1972, 2001), the Universidad Iberoamericana (1979–1981), ITESO in Guadalajara (1980–1981), and the University of Baja California (1983–1984). He has given lectures and facilitated workshops in the U.S., Australia, Europe, Latin America, New Zealand, China, Israel, and South Africa.
He is a member of the Academy of Arts of Mexico; Emeritus member of the National Academy of Architecture; Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects; and founding member of the Mexican Society of Landscape Architects (1975).
Schjetnan and GDU’s work have been recognized with numerous awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects; International Union of Architects (UIA); Italy, Spain, Ecuador, Argentina, Korea, Australia, Japan, England and Mexico.
His personal recognitions include, in 2021, the Medal of Merit in Arts from the Congress of Mexico City, in recognition of a singularly exemplary life trajectory, as well as valuable works and relevant acts, for the benefit of humanity and Mexico City; in 2019, the Elise and Walter A. Haas International Medal Award in from the University of California, Berkeley, which honors an alumnus who is a native citizen and resident of another country and who has a distinguished record of service to that country; and in 2015, the Sir Geoffrey Jellico Award from the International Federation of Landscape Architects.
