On-Demand / Oberlander Prize Forum IV: Soak It Up

Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, is Founder, President and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Prior to creating TCLF, he spent 15 years as Coordinator, National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative and a decade in private practice in NYC with a focus on landscape preservation and urban design. (During this time, he worked on a number of Olmsted-designed landscapes, including Boston’s Emerald Necklace; Prospect Park, Brooklyn; Lake Washington Boulevard, Seattle; and Downing Park, Newburgh). For the Bicentennial of Olmsted’s birth, Birnbaum was engaged in myriad programs to raise public awareness for this unrivaled legacy. His technical assistance work continues via TCLF with current projects at The Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY; Cheekwood Estate and Botanical Gardens in Nashville, TN, and the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, to cite a few examples.

Birnbaum has authored/edited numerous publications including Experiencing Olmsted (Timberpress), Modern Landscapes: Transition and Transformation (Princeton Press), Shaping the American Landscape (UVA Press), Design with Culture (UVA Press), and Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture (Spacemaker Press). Birnbaum was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) and a Rome Prize recipient. He was awarded ASLA’s LaGasse Medal in 2008, President’s Medal in 2009 and the ASLA Medal (the Society’s highest honor) in 2018. In 2023 TCLF was awarded the Olmsted Medal for their 25 years of education and advocacy.

Birnbaum serves as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s GSD (2020–present) and has served as a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture (2011–2016), and the Glimcher Distinguished Professor, Ohio State University (2007). From 2010–2018 he was a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. In 2021 TCLF unveiled the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Prize in Landscape Architecture, a permanently endowed prize with a $100,000 purse.

Yufan Gao is Core Faculty in the School of Landscape Architecture and Curator of Exhibitions at Boston Architectural College. She is also the Co-Founder of Studio Gao-Byun. With a background in sculpture and textile design, she draws on the immersive, meditative, and embodied processes of making—spatializing ideas through material and rhythm—in her work as a landscape architect, curator, and educator.

Her practice, teaching, and research explore the nuanced relationships between nature and non-nature, landscape and architecture, and the traces of time that shape place, engaging form as motion and motion as form. She focuses on found landscapes—spaces beyond traditional paradigms that hold latent aesthetic, ecological, and cultural value—and investigates how motion and stillness, bodily and cinematic, can generate new spatial understandings and transform landscape perception. She recently completed an artist residency at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where she examined landscape as a participatory medium and memorialization as a living process of motion and memory.

Yufan is a licensed landscape architect with eight years of experience at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and Mikyoung Kim Design. She holds an MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BA in Textiles from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Cornell University. Since 2018, she has taught across the Schools of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, leading design studios from introductory to advanced levels, architecture thesis, and elective courses. Her pedagogy emphasizes creative approaches to design education, drawing on curatorial thinking to transform intuitive observations into structured insights and fostering the collaborative production of knowledge among students and faculty across disciplines.  

Liu Hailong, an associate professor at the Department of Landscape Architecture, Tsinghua University, and a visiting researcher at the Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania, is interested in urban stormwater management, river protection and restoration, watershed planning, national park and heritage network, etc. He is a member of ASLA, RMS, CHSLA, CHES, CSUS, CUA, and other academic societies. 

Alison B. Hirsch, PhD, FAAR, ASLA is a landscape historian and designer. She is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture & Urbanism at University of Southern California (USC), where she founded and directs the Landscape Justice Initiative (LJI), which serves as a platform to address questions of environmental, spatial, and climate justice at local and systemic scales. One of Hirsch’s primary research projects with LJI centers on rural communities in California’s Central Valley and the vast inequalities inscribed in that landscape reshaped by 150 years of industrial agriculture. She was the 2017–2018 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy, a 2020–2021 LAF Fellow in Leadership+Innovation, and a 2024–2025 Shapiro Center for American History & Culture Fellow at the Huntington Library, where she is completing a book on her work in the lower Central Valley, most specifically on the entangled histories, presents, and futures of the Tulare Lake and the historically Black town of Allensworth, CA. Formerly, Hirsch was Director of the Landscape Architecture & Urbanism program at USC (2019–2023) and co-founder/partner at foreground design agency (2011–2023) with which she completed a number of activist speculative and built works. Author of numerous articles and chapters, Hirsch wrote City Choreographer, about the creative process landscape architect Lawrence Halprin developed with his wife, the dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin (University of Minnesota), and co-edited a volume of essays by James Corner, The Landscape Imagination (Princeton Architectural Press).

William Deverell is Co-Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Professor of History at USC. He also serves as the Divisional Dean for the Social Sciences. He has written widely on the cultural, environmental, and political history of the 19th and 20th century American West.

Alexander Robinson is Associate Professor in the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program at the USC School of Architecture. Through his Inclusive Infrastructure Design Lab and other initiatives, he seeks to reinvent our most consequential anthropogenic landscapes through collective authorship, multidisciplinary methods, and community engagement. He is the author of two books, Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture and, more recently, The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles. Prior to joining USC, Robinson practiced professionally and helped author multiple award-winning master plans, including the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. He is a member of the American Society of Landscape Architecture and was a recipient of the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize in 2015. He is also an active contributor of the community landcare initiative, TEST PLOT.

Gerdo Aquino is the firm-wide Co-CEO of SWA, an award-winning global practice operating at the leading edge of landscape architecture, planning, and urban design. Comprised of eight studios domestically and internationally, SWA’s mission is to prioritize design as an equitable platform addressing the pressing issues facing our cities and towns. For over 25 years Aquino has worked collaboratively with communities, public agencies, institutions, and private developers in Los Angeles, and around the world, in shaping a public realm informed by natural ecosystems and guided by the current needs of our built environment. Recent work includes a planning and design studies to transform Ballona Creek in Los Angeles into a multi-benefit corridor that brings equity to people, nature, and infrastructure; urban design and resiliency planning for a 4km section of the Sava River Waterfront in Belgrade, Serbia; the development of a 400ac Connectivity Plan for the Port of Los Angeles, and a new 300ac HQ campus for Walmart in Bentonville, AR. 

Aquino is a licensed landscape architect in eight states, holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard University GSD. He has taught graduate design studios at the University of Southern California and the Harvard University GSDand co-authored the research publication Landscape Infrastructure: Case Studies by SWA (2nd edition).

Jessica Henson is a Partner at OLIN where she leads the Los Angeles Studio and directs planning and design projects that seek to create socially and environmentally resilient infrastructure, including the LA Park Needs, Assessment, Los Angeles County LA River Master Plan, and the Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan. Henson’s work explores the relationships between hydrological, cultural, and social contexts. Specifically, she explores how landscape architects can create anticipatory design solutions that create more equitable communities in both urban and rural settings and respond to issues relating to flooding and water resources. In her design, teaching, and research, she seeks to broaden the scope of the profession by thinking holistically about the places we live, why we live there, and the environmental, economic, and social effects of our settlement patterns. Henson also teaches the Urban Design Studio in the USC Department of Landscape Architecture. 

Julia Prince is a registered Landscape Architect in California and an Associate at Design Workshop’s Los Angeles Studio. Through empathetic engagement with people and places, she allies client and community visions with the inherent story of the land. She creates thoughtful, regenerative designs that integrate ecological and cultural assets both functionally and poetically. From high-end residences to large-scale ecological restorations, Prince considers every project to be an opportunity to innovate. She believes in the capacity for landscapes to be places of transcendence. Across project types, scales and geographies, she strives to inspire connection with nature, spirit, and meaning beyond the surface level elements of design.

Prince leads projects at Design Workshop including the UCLA Landscape Framework Master Plan; the Topanga Lagoon Restoration Project; and private residences in Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Beverly Hills. She is a leading member of the Design Workshop Foundation, helping deliver quality designs to under-resourced communities.

Before joining Design Workshop, Prince participated in award-winning work on the Dolores Street Pollinator Boulevard at BASE Landscape Architecture and was recognized for her Graduate research by MIG, LAM, and The Wildlife Society. Prince’s interest in the intersection of non-western ontologies and water infrastructure in California guided her thesis topic, which investigated methods of cultural and ecological conservation on private lands and the restoration of tribal river governance in ancestral territory near Lake Shasta, California. Prince received her master’s in Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley and her bachelor’s in Community Development and Applied Economics from the University of Vermont.

Kush Parekh is a Landscape Architect and Design Principal at Studio-MLA with more than 20 years of experience in design, strategic planning, and project management. Passionate about cities, he is inspired by the complex relationships between socio-cultural factors and ecological systems in urban environments. With a holistic understanding of the built environment, he strives to apply the highest level of design and sustainable principles while exploring creative use of materials and building techniques. Parekh has led the Hollywood Park development and SoFi Stadium—a high profile, urban infill project of immense scale and complexity. He is currently overseeing multiple notable projects at Studio-MLA, including the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles and the California Indian Heritage Center situated at the confluence of the American River and Sacramento River.

Matt Romero is a landscape designer passionate about creating transformative public spaces that serve and inspire communities. He believes in the power of landscape architecture to advance environmental justice while responding to the unique needs of each community. His work focuses on delivering sustainable, impactful places through socially and ecologically sensitive, community-driven design. Known for his creative attention to detail and collaborative spirit, Romero contributes to a wide range of projects at Studio-MLA, from parks and open spaces along the Los Angeles and Santa Ana Rivers to active transportation corridors and greening school campuses.

Christopher Hawthorne is an architecture critic and educator. He is Senior Critic at the Yale School of Architecture, with a secondary appointment at Yale in English. He writes the weekly Punch List architecture newsletter and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the New York Review of Architecture. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harvard Design Magazine, and many other publications. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press). He served from 2018 to 2022 as the first Chief Design Officer for the city of Los Angeles, a position appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti. From 2004 to 2018 Hawthorne was the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. His earlier teaching appointments include positions at the University of Southern California, Occidental College, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and UC Berkeley. A frequent collaborator with KCET-TV, the PBS affiliate in Los Angeles, Hawthorne wrote and directed the documentary “That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles,” for which he received an LA-area Emmy Award. From 2015 to 2022, first at Occidental and then at USC, he led the Third Los Angeles Project, a series of public conversations about architecture, urban planning, mobility, and demographic change in Southern California. He has been a Mid-Career Fellow at Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and a Resident in Criticism at the American Academy in Rome.

Mario Schjetnan has an architecture degree from the National University of Mexico (UNAM). He obtained a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design from the UC Berkeley. Later he was awarded the Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University GSD to pursue advanced environmental studies.

Through his work, developed for more than 45 years, according to John Beardsley, “Mario is one of the contemporary world’s most versatile and accomplished landscape architects, a cosmopolitan designer who is emphatically Mexican.” His creations seek dialogue between tradition, modern culture, and nature with an emphasis in social justice and urban equity. His projects have received multiple national and international awards.

His personal recognitions include the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award 2015 by the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA), given for “his lifetime achievements and unique contributions, which have had a lasting effect on the improvement of life in society and the environment, as well as for his promotion and support of the profession of landscape architecture to an international level,” and the Elise and Walter A. Haas International Medal Award in 2019 from the UC Berkeley, which honors an alumni who is a foreign student who has a distinguished record of service to his country. In 2021 he received the Medal of Merit in Arts from the Mexico City Congress.
He has given design studios at Harvard’s GSD; UC Berkeley; University of Texas, Austin; the University of Virginia; and the University of Arizona.

Adriaan Geuze is Professor, Founder and Design Director of the three branches of West 8 in Rotterdam, North America, and Brussels and brings more than 35 years of experience in the fields of landscape architecture, urban design, and infrastructure. Geuze is internationally acclaimed for his pioneering work in the Netherlands and abroad. Under his leadership, West 8 has realized more than two hundred projects in three decades. Many of these delivered projects resulted from major international design competitions, including Governors Island, NY; Madrid RIO, Spain; the waterfront of Toronto, Canada; and Jubilee Gardens, London. Geuze received numerous awards for his work, including the Dutch Prix-de-Rome, the Maaskant Prize, the Oeuvre Prize for Architecture of the Mondriaan Fund, the ARC Oeuvre Award, and the ULI Netherlands Leadership Award. International prizes are the Veronica Rudge Green Prize for Urban Design (Harvard GSD) and several Honor Awards from the American Society of Landscape Architecture. In 2015 he was appointed a member of the Academy of Arts of the KNAW, an important recognition of his artistic merits. In 2022 Geuze was appointed a Professor of Landscape Architecture at Technical University Delft and the recipient of the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award in Landscape Architecture, the preeminent award for landscape architects and the highest honor IFLA can bestow. He frequently gives lectures and teaches at institutions worldwide.

Rockcastle loves leading large-scale projects and navigating complex and culturally sensitive processes. Her design and leadership approach are grounded in listening, experimentation, and empathy, allowing her work to translate experiences into landscapes through spatializing stories and activating the senses. With a background in fine arts, she balances a rigorous approach to leadership, project implementation, and design excellence with a conceptual sensibility rooted in process. She holds a BFA in Sculpture and Printmaking from Cornell University and an MLA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she won the Ian L. McHarg Prize and an ASLA Certificate of Honor.

Rockcastle’s professional experience is focused on cultural, institutional, and public realm projects. Her work spans many scales—from 4,500-acre parks to 5-acre urban plazas, to small collaborative art installations and interactive interpretive features. Recognized as a national leader of design process innovation, adaptive reuse, and culturally significant landscapes, her projects have received national awards for design excellence, sustainability, and preservation from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the Architectural League of New York, and the Urban Land Institute (ULI).

She believes in being hands-on, both as an approach to design as well as to practice inclusive, open, and successful collaborations with clients and teams. She’s deeply passionate about engaging curiosity to explore new methods of seeing and understanding landscapes and people.

Author, educator, and curator, John Beardsley was the inaugural independent curator for the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize for The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Trained as an art historian, he earned an A.B. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous books on contemporary art and design, including Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (fourth edition, 2006) and Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (1995), as well as many titles on recent landscape architecture. He has taught in the departments of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1985–96; the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1989–92; and Harvard University, Cambridge, where he was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Design from 1998 to 2013, teaching courses in landscape architectural history, theory, research, and writing.

Beardsley’s exhibitions include “Black Folk Art in America” (Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1982); “Hispanic Art in the United States” (1987); and "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" (2002; both for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). In 1997 he was curator of the visual arts project "Human Nature: Art and Landscape in Charleston and the Low Country" for the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. From 2008-19, Beardsley served as Director of Garden and Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., where his initiatives included a series of installations of contemporary art in the institution’s historic gardens, as well as a new Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded program in urban landscape studies.