The Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Prize for landscape architecture, judged by a seven-member jury of landscape architects and urbanists, selected the Mexican firm Mario Schjetnan and Grupo de Diseño Urbano from 300 nominations as winners of 2025. This prize was set in motion to ensure increased visibility, appreciation, and mainstream dialogue of and around landscape architecture. The International Prize, established in 2014, recognizes firms and practitioners who are creative, visionary, and courageous in their pursuit of design. The Oberlander Prize comprises a $100,000 award and two years of public engagement activities focused on the work of Mario Schjetnan and Grupo de Diseño Urbano, and in general, landscape architecture.
Grupo de Diseño Urbano, founded by Mario Schjetnan in 1977, is a firm that pledges its commitment to open space as a human right and integrates the cultural values about shaping an equitable built and natural environment for all. An alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley, Mario Schjetnan, and his firm tactfully blend the need for social engagement and environmental justice within landscape architecture. As the first Latin Americans to win this prize, the firm recognizes the need to advance urban design and landscape architecture in climate and environmental awareness, cultural memory, and quality of life. Mario Schjetnan states that all landscapes are about culture and that every project, however large or small, is site-specific. He further emphasizes the need for a park in every design, as an act of initiation, for social and environmental justice to be the fundamental right of every human being.
The prolific designer and his studio, spearheaded by Schjetnan, whose unique and deep understanding of landscape as a practice, studied by him with passion, has been acknowledged and awarded several grants and two honorary PhDs, one from Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Léon and the second from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. His major works include the 684-acre Ecological Park, La Mexicana Park, Bicentennial Park in Mexico City, large-scale urban parks created on reclaimed industrial sites. His portfolio of work comprises the Xochimilco Ecological Park and Copalita Eco-Archaeological Park, the Museum of the Northern Cultures in Paquimé, as well as projects in the US, such as Union Point Park in Oakland, CA, and San Pedro Creek Culture Park in San Antonio, Texas.
Here’s to the first Latin American Oberlander Prize winner, whose appreciation and amalgamating ecology and the pressures of urban development in a unified way, paving the way for the next generation of landscape architects and urbanists to learn and implement his principles through design. Here’s to Ecology! Here’s to progressive amalgamation of built and nature!
