Virtual Oberlander Prize Forum with Mario Schjetnan, Jury Chair Claire Agre and Curator Elizabeth Mossop

The first 2026 Oberlander Prize Forum features Mexican landscape architect Mario Schjetnan, winner of the 2025 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and founder of the firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), in conversation with the landscape architects Elizabeth Mossop, Oberlander Prize Curator, and Claire Agre, Oberlander Prize Jury Chair. The discussion will examine how Schjetnan’s design philosophy and concepts interweave nature and culture and are committed to design excellence.

Schjetnan and GDU, which he founded in 1977, have designed and constructed an extensive body of works of landscape architecture, urbanism, and architecture throughout Mexico, as well as in Latin America, China, the Middle East, and the U.S.  GDU’s portfolio includes a cross-section of nationally significant historic sites including Chapultepec Park, the oldest park in the Americas; Xochimilco Ecological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site with origins in the tenth century; Copalita Eco-archaeological Park in Oaxaca, as well as new parks in reclaimed post-industrial sites, such as La Mexicana Park, a vast former quarry, and Bicentennial Park on the site of the former PEMEX oil refinery in Mexico City. Schjetnan and GDU’s projects emphasize water sustainability, the recycling and repurposing of post-industrial sites, and the rehabilitation and improvement of urban and natural public spaces.

When asked to define what makes a GDU landscape, he recently stated: “I think, first of all, the concept of culture. The concept that the landscape is really about culture.” And, secondly, “it’s site specific.” Schjetnan also states, “if you want to develop a site or a new area, you have to start with a park.” He says, “the major question of my life is to improve livability [both] in the poorest sections of Mexico and Latin America—to provide social justice and urban equity—and also in the richest sections.” He believes, quite simply and—emphatically—that there is a “human right to open space.”