The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announced Julie Bargmann as the winner of the inaugural Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Landscape Architecture Prize. The biennial $100,000 award is given to a recipient who is “exceptionally talented, creative, courageous, and visionary” and has “a significant body of built work that exemplifies the art of landscape architecture.”
Bargmann, a native of Westwood, NJ, is a professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, and the founder of D.I.R.T. (“Dump It Right There”) studio. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master in Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (1987). In 1989-90 she was a Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome.
For more than 30 years as a teacher and a landscape architect, Bargmann has principally focused on contaminated, neglected, and forgotten urban and post-industrial sites. More recently, Bargmann and D.I.R.T. have acted as the conceptual design lead, working with other experts throughout the planning and design process, and sticking with many projects through construction.
According to Dorothée Imbert, chair of the seven-person international Oberlander Prize Jury, qualities that made Bargmann stand out include: “her leadership in the world of ideas, her impact on the public landscape, her model of an activist practice, and her commitment to advancing landscape architecture both through teaching and design.”
The Oberlander Prize Jury Citation notes of Bargmann: “She has been a provocateur, a critical practitioner, and a public intellectual. She embodies the kind of activism required of landscape architects in an era of severe environmental challenges and persistent social inequities.”
“The goal in establishing the Oberlander Prize was to increase the visibility, understanding, appreciation and conversation about landscape architecture,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF’s President and CEO. “The selection of Julie Bargmann as the inaugural laureate, a provocateur and innovator, is an excellent way to engage the public and usher in this next phase of the Oberlander Prize.”
