Free Webinar: Oberlander Prize Forum with 2025 Oberlander Prize winner Mario Schjetnan, Jury Chair Claire Agre, and Curator Elizabeth Mossop

Join The Cultural Landscape Foundation for an exhilarating, informative, and FREE Oberlander Prize Forum featuring Mexican landscape architect Mario Schjetnan, the most recent winner of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, and founder of Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), in conversation with Elizabeth Mossop, Oberlander Prize Curator, and Claire Agre, Jury Chair. The online discussion will explore how Schjetnan’s work weaves nature and culture to advance design excellence, sustainability, and social equity. And it will explore his bold declaration that there is a “human right to open space.”

About the Speakers:

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.), North Meadow on the Rose Kennedy Greenway (Boston, MA, U.S.), the internationally-renowned Harborplace (Baltimore, MD, U.S.), planning at The Land and Garden Preserve on Mount Desert Island, Maine; Naples Botanical Garden (Naples, FL, 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 inhabitants' quality of life, well-being, and a new ethical and aesthetic relationship with the environment.

The free registration and 1.25 LA CES™ professional development hours (pending approval) are sponsored and underwritten by Victor Stanley. The program will take place over Zoom on Thursday, February 19, from 4:00-5:15 p.m ET. Register Here.