The second 2026 Virtual Oberlander Prize Forum was a conversational webinar with Mexican landscape architect Mario Schjetnan—winner in 2025 of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and founder of Grupo de Diseño Urbano—and María Bellalta, exploring Mario’s legacy, ethos, and the state of landscape architecture education—across Latin America and the Global South. Drawing on Mario’s decades of practice and his own formation as a scholar—including graduate study at UC Berkeley and a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design—the conversation explored how education, culture, and institutional structures shape landscape architecture across the Americas. The forum examined both the urgent need and the great potential to expand the discipline to address the region’s deepening urbanization and environmental challenges. Bellalta brings to this conversation her own sustained engagement with Mexico City through advanced design studios in the region, where cross-cultural and cross-contextual lessons speak directly to an expanded field of landscape architecture, one shaped by the full range of ecotones, cultural traditions, and urban conditions that define the Americas.
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