The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) has recognized influential Canadian landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander as the namesake for a new international landscape architecture prize. 

The Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize is set to be awarded for the first time in 2021 and will come with a $100,000 award as well as two years of public engagement activities, according to a TCLF press release. 

In a statement announcing the new name for the Oberlander Prize, Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF’s president and CEO, writes, “It was the consensus of the Prize Advisory Committee, which helped shaped the Prize, and TCLF’s Board of Directors that Cornelia Oberlander’s inspiring and trailblazing career in the field of landscape architecture exemplifies the critical values and ideals of the Prize, and that she is someone who embodies the Prize criteria of creativity, courage, and vision.”

During a ceremony announcing the announcement of the prize this week, architecture critic Paul Goldberger said, "Landscape, to Cornelia Oberlander, is not a medicine you apply to architecture to make it better, but an integral part of the art of building, the art of making places. She has always known that landscape is a discipline that speaks to all that goes into the making of the cityscape, and of the deep and essential connections between landscape and cityscape—that landscape needs cityscape, that cityscape needs landscape."

Oberlander is widely known as a gifted landscape architect around the world, and has worked on dozens of projects over her 70-year-long career. The 95-year-old designer created, among many other projects, the New York Times Building lobby garden, a 4,900-square-foot atrium garden that allows sunlight to penetrate the interior of the sustainable skyscraper. According to TCLF, the atrium space contains 50-foot-tall birch trees and is inspired by the landscapes of the Hudson Valley. 

Other projects include the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, the Canadian Chancery in Washington, D.C., and the Millcreek housing project in Philadelphia. A fight over proposed design and safety upgrades to a "stramp" design created by Oberlander in collaboration with Canadian architect Arthur Erickson has recently taken shape in Vancouver. 

Oberlander is also the focus of a 2014 biography titled Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape and is among several designers profiled in City Dreamers, a feature documentary set to premiere this year. Oberlander's archives are held by the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She was awarded the American Society of Landscape Architects ASLA Medal, the organization's highest honor, in 2013 and became a Companion of the Order of Canada, one of the country's highest honors, in 2017. 

The inaugural Oberlander Prize will be awarded in 2021 in conjunction with Oberlander's 100th birthday.