Pioneering landscape architect Julie Bargmann has been announced as the inaugural winner of the newly-formed Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.

Known for her work in regenerative landscapes, the University of Virginia faculty member now has the honor of being named as the first-ever recipient of the Prize, which includes a $100,000 cash award.

The award celebrates landscape architects working at the intersection of design and social justice causes. Critic Paul Goldberger said it was about the “importance of the public realm” at a 2019 keynote address announcing the prize, adding that, in his view,  attempting to improve public building itself constitutes “a testament to belief in the social good.”

Introducing Julie Bargmann, the 2021 Oberlander Prize Laureate. Video via The Cultural Landscape Foundation on YouTube.

Bargmann has been a leader in urban reclamation projects since founding her D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) Studio in Minnesota in 1992. Her work on post-industrial sites and as a researcher, designer, and educator have helped earn her a reputation as one of the innovative minds in the field. Projects for Urban Outfitters and the Ford Motor Company stand out amongst a rich thirty-year career. Bergmann won a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in 2001, and has been featured in the 2002 rendition of Documenta. 

“She is not your typical landscape architect,” Bargmann’s colleague Elizabeth K. Meyer said of the new laureate. “She is in the thick of every major concern that landscape architects have been dealing with for the last thirty years, whether it’s sustainability or thinking about toxic and post-industrial sites, but her work is not following best practice. It’s blowing them up and establishing new practices that no one had imagined.”