‘My passion is to be with nature and introduce
people to it from all levels of society’
THE LIVING AREA, WITH A
BOLD YELLOW WALL INSPIRED
BY BAUHAUS AESTHETICS
BELOW, A NARROW WALKWAY
ABOVE THE LIVING ROOM
LEADS TO A SMALL BALCONY
OVERLOOKING THE FORESTJewish-German family sought refuge in America,
Oberlander enrolled at Smith College, one of the few
schools at the time that taught landscape architecture.
There, she was classmates with Betty Friedan. The
two did not see eye to eye on feminist theory, and while
Oberlander admits to having to work ‘twice as hard as
a man’, she ‘didn’t think of proving myself – I thought
about the project and how I could get it done’.
In 1944 she entered the Harvard Graduate School
of Design as one of the irst female students. At the
time, most American universities taught courses based
on old beaux arts techniques, but ‘at Harvard, because
of Gropius and Bauhaus, we learned to look at landscape
diferently – from conception to realisation – as
something abstract rather than decorative’. An early
career highlight was working with Kahn on a public
housing project in Philadelphia in 1951, which
informed her two social housing projects in Vancouver
in the 1960s, McLean Park and Skeena Terrace,
whose community gardens are still thriving today.
She married fellow Harvard Design School student
planner Peter Oberlander, and when he got a job
teaching at the University of British Columbia, the
family moved to Vancouver in 1953. It was a far cry from
her life on the East Coast, where she rubbed shoulders
with Kahn and Gropius, but it was a growing city with
opportunities and virtually no competition. Her irst
big commission – a landscape design for the Vancouver
home of Dr Sydney Friedman – propelled her local »
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