When I saw landscape architect Julie Bargmann lecture for the first time in the mid-1990s, she arrived in white work clothes and an orange hard hat. No, she hadn’t just come from a site. The outfit carried a message: landscape architecture isn’t just about picking pretty plants, it requires hard work in challenging, often poisonous landscapes. Plus, it can be great fun. She named her studio DIRT (an acronym for Dump It Right There), suggesting her can-do, think-big, hug-the-chaos attitude.
This philosophy, together with what has become an important work, has earned Bargmann the first Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Prize, a US $ 100,000 award given by the non-profit Kulturlandschaft Foundation. The prize was created as a landscape’s response to the Pritzker Prize for Architecture. Charles Birnbaum, President of the Foundation, described her as a “provocateur and innovator” and her selection as “an excellent opportunity to engage the public”.
Julie Bargmann, winner of the Oberländer Prize 2021. Photo Barrett Doherty courtesy of the Cultural Landscape Foundation
Bargmann’s projects, typically involving devastated or industrial landscapes, range from large urban works (the Urban Outfitters headquarters in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard) to more rural ones (the Vintondale Reclamation Park, a 35-acre bioremediation project in Pennsylvania’s coal country). . Bargmann’s work also includes converting the Turtle Creek Pump House into a residential garden. Deedie Rose, who Bargmann and her husband Rusty hired for this Jon, remembers the impression Bargmann had when they first met. “I was so intrigued by Julie and her ideas and how much fun they were that I just hired her on the spot,” she said. “She will not treat it as a place to plant plants, but rather as a place for ideas.”
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