Oral History with Oberlander Prize Laureate Julie Bargmann

The extraordinary life and career of landscape architect Julie Bargmann, recipient of the inaugural Oberlander Prize, is the subject of the eighteenth oral history in the award-winning Pioneers of American Landscape Design^® Oral History Project series.

Pioneering landscape architect Julie Bargmann, recipient of the inaugural Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, is internationally recognized as an innovative designer of regenerative landscapes, an influential educator, first at the University of Minnesota and since 1995 at the University of Virginia (UVA), and intellectual leader in addressing social and environmental justice. For more than thirty years as a teacher and a landscape architect, Julie Bargmann has principally focused on contaminated, neglected, and forgotten urban and post-industrial sites.  According to Bargmann: “Unearthing the raw ingredients of design from waste and wastelands defines my life’s work. Both the pedagogy of my teaching and my methodology as a designer address the social and ecological imperatives to reclaim degraded land. Integrating regenerative technologies with design propositions and built landscapes embodies my contribution to the discipline of landscape architecture.”