Mother Nature

Thanks to projects like Robson Square, the Museum of Anthropology and the National Gallery of Canada, 82-year-old Cornelia Oberlander is the undisputed queen of landscape architecture.

By Timothy Taylor

“DON'T CALL IT SOIL,” Cornelia Oberlander corrects. “It’s growing medium.”

We’re standing in the rain on the 25-foot-high hillock on the southeast corner of Robson and Hornby, a crucial detail in Oberlander’s collaboration with Arthur Erickson in designing Robson Square. “The Mound,” as it is known, is pleasantly rioted-over with rhododendrons, pines and vine maples. But none of this is growing out of soil. It is, in fact, a falsework internal frame layered over with three feet of dirt-like material (pumice is involved here) that’s light enough for the roof below to bear, while retaining the properties necessary to support plant life. Which is all quite technical, but also important in understanding the 82-year-old, internationally celebrated landscape genius behind it, who is standing under her umbrella just now, having moved on from the mound itself to address the aesthetic unity of what may be viewed most advantageously from it: the flowing stramps and waterfalls of Robson Square, the serene cadence of planter boxes, the forested bridges over Smithe to the glassy, cathedric heights of Erickson’s famous Law Courts.

I’d hardly noticed the Mound previously, I admit. But having attained its summit, seen its oddly private views, standing just then listening to Oberlander speak—this “undisputed Queen of the landscape scene” as architecture critic Trevor Boddy has described her to me, and he means in the world—I suddenly see The Mound as representative of her. A subtle feature of the design that launched her towards the fame she now enjoys. A bit of technical mastery, all but hidden in the quiet aesthetic effect that it achieves.

“Gardens on a roof!” Oberlander says to me half an hour later, over lemon tea in the Gallery Café. “This is 1974, okay?”

She’s very small. She’s very sharp. She speaks slowly, with intensity, clarity. She pauses often to make sure you’re keeping up. “Okay?” she says. “Yes?”

Yes: 1974. Decades before the term “green roof” would be widely known. A surprising year, too, given an outsider might have thought Cornelia Oberlander had already achieved her measure of success.

Born in Germany in June 1924, Oberlander, whose father died when she was young, emigrated with her mother, a horticulturalist, and her sister to Westchester County north of New York City in 1939 and eventually moved to a farm in New Hampshire. She’d gone on to receive her education at Smith and Harvard, where she studied architecture and landscape under the legendary Walter Gropius. She worked early on for big names, Dan Kiley, Louis Kahn. She moved to Vancouver in 1953 with her husband Peter, an architect and city planner she’d met at a Harvard class picnic who’d gone on to become Trudeau’s deputy minister for Urban Affairs. She raised a family of three children—now grown; a doctor, a historic preservationist and an art teacher, respectively—all the while building a sizable reputation for her work in playground design, including the Children’s Creative Centre for Expo ’67.

She was 50 in 1974, mature in family and profession. She had a World’s Fair credit, for crying out loud. Your run-of-the-mill bermer—as snob architects were known to call their landscape colleagues in that era—might have been thinking about a gentle 10-year coast through to retirement.

Not Oberlander. “The telephone rang. It was Bing Thom. ‘Cornelia, we have a three-block project, Robson Square. We need a landscape architect. Please come this afternoon.’”
Of course she was going to that meeting. Which is how Oberlander’s ideas ended up in the same room as those of Arthur Erickson, who, commissioned by the new NDP provincial government to redesign the Provincial Law Courts, had just decided to tip a proposed 55-storey office tower onto its side and cap it with a “lineal park.”

“Most landscape architects I’d used before were too…sentimental,” Erickson says now. “Not tough enough. Not intellectually up to the challenge. But I remember Cornelia felt the potential.”
What she might also have felt was a perfect canvas laid out for the palette of her ideas. An austere canvas, certainly: Erickson’s vision was concrete, pocked with form marks, rough to the touch. A structure celebrating, as they say, materiality. And not vertically either, such that the brutality would taper away from the eye, recede into the sky. The Law Courts were to be brutal horizontally, from Nelson clear to Robson.

And yet, not so brutal today, as you climb stairs, past pools, flying planters with white roses, trees stretching away in lines. Not brutal at all, as you pass through a forest of lodgepole pines and around a corner to find…magic. A cone of near silence at the heart of the city, where the cars and sirens disappear, all gone but your thoughts and the gentle white-out hiss of falling water.

How does it work? You might ask yourself, having found that spot. How does Oberlander render the concrete so serene? “A remarkable accomplishment,” said the American Society of Landscape Architects, giving Oberlander and Erickson the President’s Award of Excellence in 1978. Yes, but why?

Patterns and repetitions. There’s the secret. It might look like “nature imported into the city,” as various writers have described it: a bit of mountain here, a strip of forest there, a flowering trail winding away over yonder. But it is in no way like the nature to which it refers. Everywhere, instead, the regularity, the rigour of the modernist idea. A whispered architectural mantra reworked in flowering form. You find it in the metronomic regularity of the maple allee. In those repeated planter boxes.

“Each with the same planting, yes? Two pines, a magnolia and a maple. Every planter box the same. That is the strength of a good design. Okay? That is how people’s eyes are carried. Minimalism. I repeat myself. I’m not having a jungle like this out here.”

Oberlander waves a hand toward the Gallery Café window, out of which can be seen the overgrown planters of the Vancouver Art Gallery (maintained separately from Robson Square) spilling their profusion of ferns and rubber plants.

“It’s awful,” she says. “It’s disgusting.”

“You don’t like the rambling, English look?”

“No. Minimalism.”

“Like the architecture of Walter Gropius?”

“Yes. Less is more!”

But Oberlander is also more than “less is more.” Consider her staggering output over the 20 years that followed to see how fresh themes were woven through her modernist training. Speaking to students at SFU’s June 2002 convocation, she summarized this succinctly: “Achieving a fit between the built form and the land has been my dictum.”

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