Marion E. Pressley
Marion Pressley, president of Pressley Associates in Newton, Massachusetts, is one of very few professionals to achieve national recognition and awards in both historic preservation and contemporary design. She has been a practicing landscape architect since 1969, and from 1983 to 2018 she was in partnership with her husband, Bill, at Pressley Associates, where she is now the sole owner. Between 1969 and 1983, Ms. Pressley was with Carol R. Johnson Associates. Over her 50-year practice, Ms. Pressley has demonstrated strong design skills and a commitment to both private and public landscapes through a wide range of projects. Her projects often benefit from her remarkable expertise in facilitating community participation to achieve design conscience.
In addition to her professional practice, from 1972 to 2017 Ms. Pressley has helped build the next generation of landscape architects through courses taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Landscape Institute, and the Boston Architectural College. She also lectures frequently at conferences and other educational institutions on topics related to landscape design, history, planting design, and preservation. She has a long history with the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, having served as president and trustee for the chapter, and she will be the 2020 President of the Fellows.
Statement: When I was told that The Cultural Landscape Foundation wanted to “recognize and amplify the contributions of a living landscape architect” who has had significant impact through their practice, I agreed that the Oberlander Prize was an outstanding idea. Being a person interested in history, I had looked at women practitioners whose work interested me. I found that Cornelia was at Smith College, where women who wanted to become landscape architects went to the affiliated Cambridge School because, at that time, women could not attend Harvard. But after graduating in 1944, she was one of the first women to be admitted to the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I also found out that she was a woman who continually was ahead of her time. Her body of work had a social conscience, and her devotion to sustainability, universal accessibility, and integration of the built and natural world resulted in many outstanding projects, some of them international projects. Even now, at age 98, her passion doesn’t seem to allow her to retire.
