Learning to juggle in life
Taken in 1989 in an orchard on her Vancouver property, the photo shows the landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander energetically juggling with a pair of apples. Oberlander, 68 years old, had just finished one of her famous collaborations with the architect Arthur Erickson: a project for which they were awarded the National Landscape Award [1]. Over the years, Oberlander had become a pioneer in her field. She had succeeded in giving landscape architecture a driving role within the construction of cities. At the time the image was taken, she was not only at the peak of her success, but already a grandmother of two and far from putting down her pen. The image could fall into a cliché: a woman in her Sunday dress, light-heartedly juggling a pair of apples. However, it is deliberately chosen to delineate the agency of Oberlander to the solitary act of her profession. Instead, it attempts to reveal the portrait of a woman that stood juggling many counteracting parts of her life.
One strand of her life was her escape from Nazi Germany at the age of seventeen. She went on to study at Smith College, and later at Harvard Design School, and left with great determination to succeed in her field. But when articulating her sentiments, she speaks of the struggle to assimilate to American society. Where the field of her interest was clear from the onset, nurtured by her mother’s profession as a horticulturist, her gravitation towards it was propelled by the unstoppable will power of an outsider to common social attitudes. Not only was she a woman, almost solitary in her profession, but a German Jew, ruptured from her previous cultural identity and made to continuously reflect on the status quo.
Just as she saw herself a stranger to her new life, she started to dwell on the issue of nature becoming ever stranger to city life. After graduating, she joined the office of the landscape architect Dan Kiley in Vermont, in whom she saw a mentor to her intrinsic awareness of the delicate state of the environment. It was Kiley who had told her to walk lightly in the woods, a comment which went on to reflect Oberlander’s advocacy for a humble relationship between nature and the urban fabric.
As a mother of three, it became far from easy to follow this mission. And even though she would set up her practice in their home in Vancouver and learn to tweak the system here and there – taking their children to the construction sites to play, for example – she speaks of much more than pragmatic solutions: ‘You had to have courage and self-confidence to last this type of life. The motto was: just keep on going.’ [2]
Returning to the image: the cliché is broken, and what we see, in fact, is a woman at work. As she threw one challenge up into the air, she had the another in the grip of her hand. It was in her capability to keep the strands of her life together that Oberlander demonstrates her agency: taking a stand on the challenges, tweaking the system, and making it work.
Image Credits: Photo Kiku Hawkes.
1 The Canadian Chancery in Washington, DC built 1983–90.
2 Hahn Oberlander, Cornelia. Interview. “Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Oral History Interview Transcript.” By Charles A. Birnbaum and Tom Fox. The Cultural Landscape Foundation Pioneers of American Landscape Design. 3–5 August 2008. Web. (Accessed 19 July 2022) Link.
