Virtual Oberlander Prize Forum with Mario Schjetnan, Jury Chair Claire Agre and Curator Elizabeth Mossop
The first 2026 Oberlander Prize Forum features Mexican landscape architect Mario Schjetnan, winner of the 2025 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and founder of the firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), in conversation with the landscape architects Elizabeth Mossop, Oberlander Prize Curator, and Claire Agre, Oberlander Prize Jury Chair. The discussion will examine how Schjetnan’s design philosophy and concepts interweave nature and culture and are committed to design excellence.
Schjetnan and GDU, which he founded in 1977, 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 U.S. GDU’s portfolio includes a cross-section of nationally significant historic sites including Chapultepec Park, the oldest park in the Americas; Xochimilco Ecological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site with origins in the tenth century; Copalita Eco-archaeological Park in Oaxaca, as well as new parks in reclaimed post-industrial sites, such as La Mexicana Park, a vast former quarry, and Bicentennial Park on the site of the former PEMEX oil refinery in Mexico City. 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 [both] in the poorest sections of Mexico and Latin America—to provide social justice and urban equity—and also in the richest sections.” He believes, quite simply and—emphatically—that there is a “human right to open space.”
Elizabeth Mossop, Oberlander Prize Curator
Professor Elizabeth Mossop is Dean of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) School of Design, Architecture and Building and a landscape architect and urbanist with wide-ranging experience in both landscape design and urban planning. Elizabeth is a founding principal of Spackman Mossop & Michaels landscape architects based in Sydney, Australia, and New Orleans, LA. With an academic career spanning 25 years, Elizabeth has held key roles at universities in both the United States and Australia. Before joining UTS, she was Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University, one of the highest ranked landscape architecture programs in the United States. Previously, she was the Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Claire Agre, Oberlander Prize Jury Chair
Claire Agre is a Partner and Cofounder of Unknown Studio Landscape Architecture & Urban Design, based in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. Prior to that she was a Principal in the New York City office of the Rotterdam, Netherlands-based West 8 urban design and landscape architecture firm. Broadening landscape practice with a background in painting and ecology, her work puts physical and social connectivity at the forefront.
Agre has led design and implementation for a diverse portfolio of projects, including: Governors Island (New York, N.Y., U.S.), Druid Lake (Baltimore, MD, U.S.), North Meadow on the Rose Kennedy Greenway (Boston, MA, U.S.), the internationally-renowned Harborplace (Baltimore, MD, U.S.), Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Location), multiple plans for Longwood Gardens and its award-winning Main Fountain Garden Revitalization (Kennett Square, PA, U.S.), The Nasher Haemisegger Family Sculpture Garden at Duke University (Durham, N.C., U.S.), planning at The Land and Garden Preserve on Mount Desert Island, Maine; Naples Botanical Garden (Naples, FL, U.S.), Houston Botanic Garden (Houston, TX, U.S.), and at the largest scale, the winning entry for Changing Course—an interdisciplinary, international design competition seeking solutions for the disappearing Lower Mississippi Delta.
Mario Schjetnan
Mario Schjectnan, winner of the 2025 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), and 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 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 inhabitant's 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, and among others.
