Landscape architecture’s top prize goes to Mario Schjetnan

The top prize in landscape architecture has just been awarded to Mexican designer Mario Schjetnan, a multifaceted landscape architect whose work has transformed parks across Mexico City and vastly expanded social housing projects across his home coountry.

Schjetnan and his firm, Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), were announced winners of the 2025 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, a biennial award from the Cultural Landscape Foundation recognizing the most influential and impactful practitioners in the field.

Schjetnan and GDU have designed some of the most significant parks in Mexico, including Chapultepec Forest and Park, the second-largest city park in Latin America, known colloquially as Mexico’s “Central Park.” With a focus on equitable access to nature, the application of environmental knowledge, and the potential of postindustrial sites, GDU’s work has expanded the notion of what parks can do in Mexico. The Oberlander Prize jury’s citation calls Schjetnan “a strong voice for social engagement and environmental justice in tandem with the art of landscape architecture.”

The Oberlander Prize includes a $100,000 award and two years of public engagement activities focused on the laureate’s work. Schjetnan is the third designer to win the prize. Landscape architect Julie Bargmann, whose D.I.R.T. Studio focuses on degraded sites, was the inaugural laureate in 2021. Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, known for his work designing “sponge cities,” was honored in 2023. (Yu died in an airplane crash on September 23, 2025, in Brazil.)

GDU’s best work

Schjetnan cofounded GDU in 1977 after five years helping lead a vast worker housing program for the Mexican government that created more than 100,000 units of affordable housing across the country. GDU’s work built on that social focus, emphasizing access to natural areas and the use of natural systems to repair damaged spaces in and around urban areas.

“The major question of my life is to improve liveability in the poorest sections of Mexico and Latin America, to provide social justice and urban equity, and also in the richest sections,” he said.

Another of Schjetnan and GDU’s most notable projects is the 684-acre Xochimilco Ecological Park in Mexico City, a nature preserve and recreational space that’s part of a famed lagoon area recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Schjetnan’s U.S. projects include a waterfront park in Oakland, California; an interpretive landscape focused on immigrant workers located in Sonoma, California; and a linear park along a creek in San Antonio. GDU has also built projects across Latin America and the Middle East.

In awarding Schjetnan the Oberlander Prize, the Cultural Landscape Foundation is celebrating an approach to landscape architecture that bleeds across design disciplines to create longer-lasting change in the lives of urban dwellers.

“For more than 50 years, Mario Schjetnan’s unwavering commitment to the idea of a human right to have access to open space and the necessity for incorporating cultural values in his work have served as foundational requirements in shaping and managing an equitable built environment for all,” said Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

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