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Six hundred people registered for the three-day Oberlander Prize Forum Soak it Up: Los Angeles, CA, which had as its centerpiece a daylong conference at the elegant Bovard Auditorium at the University of Southern California (USC) about landscape architecture’s leadership in managing the Los Angeles River, urban flooding, and drought in Southern California. ���޾�Ʒ����һ�� (���޾�Ʒ����һ��) event received generous support from lead sponsors SWA and PlayCore, along with a dozen other sponsors including OLIN, the Shafran + Haimes Foundation, SPJ Lighting, and West 8. It was curated by Prof. Alison Hirsch, PhD at the USC School of Architecture and Charles Birnbaum, ���޾�Ʒ����һ��’s President and CEO. Bookending the conference was an evening reception at SWA’s new LA studio and a day of mobile workshops at notable built projects in the LA area. Soak it Up was slated to be the final program associated with, and was to feature, the 2023 Oberlander Prize winner Kongjian Yu, the Beijing-based landscape architect and global champion of the “sponge cities” concept for mitigating urban flooding. However, following his tragic death on September 23, 2025, in a small plane crash in Brazil, Soak it Up evolved into a memorial to him and his revolutionary work. Videos of all the conference presentations will be richly produced and unveiled in 2026.

Three Event-filled Days

Kicking things off, on Thursday, December 4 in downtown LA, attendees gathered at the recently completed SWA Studio for an opening reception. SWA Co-CEO and ���޾�Ʒ����һ�� Board Member Gerdo Aquino welcomed guests followed by ���޾�Ʒ����һ��’s Birnbaum, who introduced environmental artist and activist Lauren Bon, founder of Metabolic Studio. Bon discussed her company’s decades-long involvement with the LA River and some of the headline grabbing actions she and her firm have taken to highlight its significance and fragility. A speaker’s dinner followed at Drago Centro hosted by ���޾�Ʒ����һ�� Season of Events Sponsors ABC Stone and Victor Stanley.

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Ample sunshine and warm temperatures greeted conference attendees outside USC’s Bovard Auditorium as they registered for the December 5 conference. The audience included dozens of students from area universities (and as far as IIT in Chicago), landscape architects, architects, and allied professionals, ���޾�Ʒ����һ�� Board and Stewardship Council Members, municipal officials and decision makers from Southern California and elsewhere, and many others.

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The proceedings included the premiere of an eight-minute long video about Kongjian Yu, in which the late designer discussed his life and work, followed by heartfelt and personal recollections about Yu by Yufan Gao, Curator of Exhibitions, Boston Architectural College, and curator of and Liu Hailong, Tsinghua University and University of Pennsylvania; Yu was Hailong’s thesis advisor and close friend.

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The day was organized into a series of presentations: the first, titled Southern California Palimpsest: A Landscape of Ecological Abundance, Cultural Complexity and Climatological Extremes, focused on the region’s ecological and cultural history. Hirsch, William Deverell, Co-Director, Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West, and Alexander Robinson, Associate Professor, University of Southern California School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture + Urbanism Program, Inclusive Infrastructure Design Lab, offered a fascinating look at Southern California’s landscape and how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the addition of increasingly complex hydraulic infrastructures—dams, aqueducts, and concrete channels—enabled rapid urban growth. 

Notably the Los Angeles Aqueduct, completed in 1913, and the Colorado River Aqueduct, completed in 1941, redefined the metropolis, severed watersheds, and fueled speculative expansion. Significantly, Hirsch discussed how the never-implemented plans by Olmsted Brothers and Harland Bartholomew could have prevented many of the problems that are now being experienced in the region. Deverell explored how planners, engineers, politicians, boosters, and the public worked together—and crosswise—in making critical decisions about water management. Robinson addressed how the future of water infrastructure lies in deepening and shifting its entanglement with the diverse forces that exert agency over it—regulatory bodies, flood managers, engineers, ecologists, community groups, artists, and the landscape itself.

Under the theme Learning from Los Angeles, SWA’s Aquino, OLIN partner Jessica Henson, Design Workshop associate Julia Prince, and, principal Kush Parekh and associate principal Matt Romero from Studio-MLA, offered fascinating perspectives and relevant case studies that delved into the complexities currently facing landscape architects. Aquino discussed water security and the many factors that affect planning for a series of proposed reservoirs, including habitat for the endangered four-inch long San Bernardino Kangaroo Rat. Henson focused on the challenges of balancing water management with public space needs and environmental justice in landscape architectural projects for the future benefit of all, against a backdrop of rapidly accelerating climate change and loss of biodiversity. Prince’s presentation stemmed from several questions including: how do we honor historic ecology while making space for the residents of today? And, when turning back the clock is not a productive goal, what does landscape restoration look like? The presenters from Studio-MLA discussed projects that are shifting from a reliance on importing water to learning to live with water in place. Projects included Urban Orchard Park in South Gate, along the LA River, where stormwater capture and treatment is shaping multi-benefit infrastructure that restores habitat, expands park access, and strengthens community health; and SoFi Stadium's six-acre Lake Park, which is filled with reclaimed water and also captures on-site stormwater. 

Each of the conference's panel presentations were followed by comments from a pair respondents who, notably, are not landscape architects. Hunter Merritt, a lecturer at California State University, Sacramento, and Evelyn Cortez-Davis, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (the nation's largest municipal utility), offered observations that were personal, amusing, and deeply perceptive.

A Plenary Provocation by Christopher Hawthorne punctuated the day’s proceedings. Hawthorne, who recently launched the weekly newsletter and is currently at Yale University, is the former Los Angeles Times architecture critic (2004-2018) and first Chief Design Officer for the city of Los Angeles (2018-2022). He summed up the proceedings first by proclaiming landscape architecture is distinct because, unlike other disciplines, it inherently deals with complexity and that the profession should be in a leadership role in dealing with water infrastructure. He also discussed three themes that he believed defined the conference: embrace bigness and scale up to meet the magnitude of the challenges; reframe advocacy; unmaking and undoing to address past planning inadequacies. 

The final panel, which revealed global strategies and perspectives, was introduced by John Beardsley, the inaugural Oberlander Prize curator, and included the 2025 Oberlander Prize laureate Mario Schjetnan, founder of Grupo de Diseño Urbano in Mexico City, as well as Adriaan Geuze, founder of West 8 in Rotterdam, and Maura Rockcastle, co-founder of TEN X TEN in Minneapolis.

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Schjetnan addressed two projects: the master plan for Mexicali Fluye, which is a nearly three-mile stretch of a river south of Mexicali, Baja California, created largely by irrigation-canal water; and the Tecnoparque development in Mexico City’s Azcapotzalco borough, a thirteen-hectare post-industrial site envisioned as an office hub for data and call centers on which Schjetnan and his firm have been working for more than twenty years. He illustrated the latter with images of the vast underground complex of cisterns and wells that retain stormwater (rather than funneling it into the overburdened municipal system).

Geuze discussed Holland’s Room for the River Programme, a national initiative launched in 1993 to address flooding, and how it applies to several of his firm’s projects. He also spent time on a significant project in Egypt before concluding with work in California. Rockcastle examined how work in the public realm of the Mississippi River could honor Indigenous legacy, build resilience, and better understand future vulnerabilities through the lens of two projects: the Mississippi River Learning Center, a mixed-use, river-focused facility with year-round environmental, cultural, and historical learning along Saint Paul’s stretch of the Mississippi River; and the Indian Mounds or Wicạ ḣapi, the only known remaining burial mounds within the Minneapolis-Saint Paul urban core. Her firm has developed a plan that would result in the replacement of recreational features and activities with preservation and interpretation of the burial ground, expansion of native plants, and other measures. 

The second round of respondents featured Chelina Odbert, an architect and Co-Founder and Executive Director, Kounkuey Design Initiative, and Patrick Sisson, a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist whose work appears in The New York Times and numerous other prominent outlets. Sisson offered perspectives that reflected being the father of young children and Odbert zero-ed in on some of the most important issues addressed that day.

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Following the conference, PlayCore hosted a festive reception at which conference speakers, respondents, and attendees met, mixed, compared notes about the day's presentations, and enjoyed a temperate Southern California evening. 

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The mobile workshops on Saturday, December 6 included four based on projects presented at the conference. For attendees, it was an opportunity to get a deeper understanding of the Sepulveda Basin, the UCLA campus, Milton Street Park, and SoFi Stadium, and to hear from various members of the design team. At Metabolic Studio, Bon and her team discussed how urban soils, particularly in frontline communities, have been deeply impacted by the city’s industrial legacy and the 2025 wildfires. The USC Inclusive Infrastructure Design Lab Field Session included a walk along a section of the LA River and flooding simulations on a precisely engineered 60-foot-long, 1:120 hydraulic model of the river. 

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The conference and associated events collectively demonstrated how landscape architects and the profession of landscape architecture are generating the big ideas and bold solutions for addressing climate change accelerated urban flooding, along with drought and large-scale water management. The work of Oberlander Prize laureate Kongjian Yu, a self-described peasant's son who went on to fundamentally change the urban policy of a global superpower, continues to inspire current practitioners, as well as students in the field; and it has given policy makers a new way to look at problem solving and at a profession uniquely qualified to deal with some of the most significant issues we face today: landscape architecture. Look for more Oberlander Prize Forum programming in the new year.