Oberlander Forum: Design, EDUCATION AND PRACTICE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Mario Schjetnan & María Bellalta
Virtual Oberlander Prize Forum: Design, EDUCATION AND PRACTICE IN THE EMERGING ECONOMIES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH with Mario Schjetnan & María Bellalta
The second 2026 Virtual Oberlander Prize Forum will be a conversational webinar with Mexican landscape architect Mario Schjetnan—winner in 2025 of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and founder of Grupo de Diseño Urbano—and María Bellalta, exploring Mario’s legacy, ethos, and the state of landscape architecture education—across Latin America and the Global South. Drawing on Mario’s decades of practice and his own formation as a scholar—including graduate study at UC Berkeley and a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design—the conversation will explore how education, culture, and institutional structures shape landscape architecture across the Americas. The forum will examine both the urgent need and the great potential to expand the discipline to address the region’s deepening urbanization and environmental challenges. Bellalta brings to this conversation her own sustained engagement with Mexico City through advanced design studios in the region, where cross-cultural and cross-contextual lessons speak directly to an expanded field of landscape architecture, one shaped by the full range of ecotones, cultural traditions, and urban conditions that define the Americas. Mario and María will reflect on the foundations of a renewed and timely 21st-century landscape architecture and environmental design paradigm.
Mario Schjetnan, FASLA
Mario Schjetnan, FASLA, winner in 2025 of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and the founder of Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), has 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 León 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 is part of 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 inhabitants’ quality of life, well-being, and a new ethical and aesthetic relationship with the environment.
Schjetnan’s influences include Mexican Modernist architects such as Luis Barragán, Max Cetto, and Mario Pani. In terms of landscape architecture, he cites Luis Barragán, Roberto Burle Marx, and Lawrence Halprin (the latter was his impetus for studying at Berkeley), along with artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Juan O’Gorman, novelist Carlos Fuentes, poet Octavio Paz, and the country’s rich legacy of pre-Hispanic myths, architecture and culture, among others.
María Bellalta, FASLA, IFLA
María Bellalta, FASLA, IFLA, is a professor and department head for Landscape Architecture + Environmental Planning, and director for global engagement in the College of Design at North Carolina State University. She teaches advanced studios in Colombia and Mexico City focused on urbanization of the Global South, promoting social and environmental equity. She is the director of education and academic affairs for the International Federation of Landscape Architects, Americas Region (IFLA AR) and leads the Red Americana de Educación en Arquitectura del Paisaje (RAEAP), forging an academic network for expanding landscape architecture education and practice in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Her academic collaborations span Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Colombia; Centro Metropolitano de Arquitectura Sustentable in Mexico City; Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico; and Isthmus, Panama, among others. Her professional experience includes positions with Buró Verde Arquitectura, Martha Schwartz Partners, Sasaki Associates, and Copley Wolff Design Group. She is former dean and head of the School of Landscape Architecture, Boston Architectural College. She received her Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, with prior studies in environmental psychology at the University of Notre Dame. María is originally from Chile.
