Virtual Oberlander Prize Forum: Where do we go from here?
In this final Virtual Oberlander Prize Forum for the year, Laureate Mario Schjetnan will be in conversation with three emerging practitioners about the future of the discipline. Yu Han Goh of Salad Dressing in Singapore, Yoshiki Mishima of Folk in Tokyo and Liz Camuti of SMM and Tulane in New Orleans.
Each of these fascinating practitioners will make a brief presentation of the distinctive ideas that drive their work and their visions of the discipline’s future. Mario will respond to their ideas and this will form the basis of a conversation moderated by Oberlander Prize Curator Elizabeth Mossop.
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.
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.
Liz Camuti
Liz Camuti is a licensed landscape architect and educator based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Architecture at Tulane University's School of Architecture and Built Environment and a Senior Associate at SMM. Her research and teaching interrogate the socio-ecological afterlives of extractive infrastructure along the Gulf Coast, focusing on sites of coastal protection and energy production. Through design prototyping, policy analysis, and material experimentation, her work attends to the dynamics of land, capital, and labor that shape how these landscapes get built—and to the ways their materials, living and engineered, carry political and ecological consequences. Liz was named the 2018 National Olmsted Scholar (Graduate) and currently serves on the board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF).
Yoshiki Mishima
Yoshiki Mishima is a landscape architect and a founding director at FOLK, Inc.
Born in Tokyo, he graduated from Keio University. He later earned a Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Before founding FOLK in 2015, he worked at the New York office of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and then served as an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Engineering at the University of Tokyo.
He specializes in researching, designing, and managing public spaces and social commons based on ecological / cultural resources in various regions across Japan. He serves as a board member for the Social Green Design Association and as the director for the Shimokita Engei-bu. Notable project awards include the Green City Award Prime Minister's Award (Shimokita Engei-bu, 2023), the Japanese Institute of Landscape Architecture Award (Shimokita Engei-bu, 2024), and JSCE Civil Engineering Design Prize Award of Excellence (Mt. Takao Fumoto Park, 2025).
Goh Yu Han
Goh Yu Han is Design Director at Salad Dressing, a Singapore-based landscape architecture and experiential design studio. Malaysian-born and trained in both landscape architecture and the arts, she has been part of the practice since its inception.
Her work explores landscape as a field of relationships between humans, plants, animals, technologies, atmospheres, and memory. Drawing from art history, literature, ecological thinking, and more-than-human perspectives, Yu Han is interested in how design can shift perception and invite new forms of coexistence.
Her projects include Jurong Lake Gardens, the Venice Biennale, the Singapore Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, the Square Forest movement, and a series of experimental gardens. Through her practice, she investigates how landscape architecture might move beyond human-centred design toward more reciprocal relationships with the living world
