MKSK Studio
Statement: The women of MKSK are excited to have this opportunity to support the Oberlander Prize. Women make up 40 percent of our practice. We are very excited to see this award named for a very important pioneering landscape architect who is also a woman. While Cornelia is the most highly decorated Canadian landscape architect and is considered to be the Dean of Canadian Landscape Architecture, to many landscape architects trained in the United States she was less well-known. We believe it is through the work of The Cultural Landscape Foundation that her story is being told, and her guidance is being disseminated.
MKSK is a collective of landscape architects, urban designers, and planners who are passionate about the interaction between people and place. We practice with a network of seven regional metropolitan studios to shape place, improve lives, and share the story to inspire ourselves, our industry, and the world to work together for the common good. We celebrate the power of collaboration and strive to author transformational projects that unite and uplift all through creative site design born of place. We partner to create places that are socially connected, ecologically responsive, and economically sustainable while creating a canvas on which enhanced future life experiences occur.
Cornelia Oberlander is a visionary, a strong-willed design leader, and an influential collaborator within the field of landscape architecture. To hear her speak about her professional trajectory is moving—she makes it sound easy and inevitable that a woman entering the profession in the 1940s would work with Louis Kahn, Dan Kiley, and others on some of the most iconic work of the twentieth century. With matter-of-fact confidence she claims her legacy. Her work as a champion of modernism and sustainable design, and her ongoing presence as an iconic role model for women in the field, is something to celebrate.