Projects

In his analysis of the cultural and psychological conditions in the world’s second-largest country, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye wrote, “Canada surrounds and engulfs” those who let themselves be drawn into its vast landscape. “In Canada,” Frye observed, “there is a single gigantic east-west thrust down the St. Lawrence, up the Great Lakes, and across the prairies, then through whatever holes a surveyor could find in the Rockies to the west coast.”

Not only are humans shaped by the immense Canadian landscape. “Our architecture is landscape,” writes the Canadian architecture critic Lisa Rochon2. This is particularly true for the landscape designs of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. The rock of the Canadian Shield, one of the planet’s oldest formations, sets the tone in Oberlander’s Taiga Garden in Ottawa. Wild roses, bearberry shrubs, and grasses with colourful blossoms surround the igloo-like capital building in Yellowknife. Canada’s enormous water resources, which make up one third of the earth’s freshwater reserves, are referenced in many of Oberlander’s projects, such as her motif of the Mackenzie River delta on the roof garden of the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, or the waterfall muting the traffic noise at Robson Square in Vancouver.

The exhibit shows what contemporary landscape architecture can accomplish and how landscape can become an aesthetic experience. The exhibit is also a way to bring together the two countries, Canada and Germany, and two generations.