Pioneer Information
Born in Mexico City, Schjetnan earned an undergraduate architecture degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1968. He then enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed an MLA in 1970. He subsequently returned to Mexico City to teach urbanism and ecology at UNAM. In 1972 he became the first head of urban and housing design at INFONAVIT, a government initiative to provide workers’ housing. For the next five years Schjetnan traveled extensively across Mexico, building approximately 100,000 houses/units across 110 cities. This work introduced Schjetnan to the country’s “mosaic of cultures” and encouraged him to pursue equitable environmental and urban design solutions, supported by his emphatic belief that access to open space is a human right.
Schjetnan founded Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU) in 1977 with architect and principal partner José Luiz Pérez, and Irma Schjetnan and Letty Pérez, their wives. For Schjetnan, culture is inseparable from the landscape and a foundational design element in his work throughout Mexico, as well as in Latin America, China, the Middle East, and the United States. His designs incorporate and highlight centuries of Aztec, Spanish, and modern Mexican history in places like Chapultepec Forest and Park (2006), Latin America’s oldest park, and Xochimilco Ecological Park (1993), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Post-industrial site transformations include Bicentennial Park – Nature Garden (2012), a former PEMEX oil field, and La Mexicana Park (2017), a former mine. He has also worked on cultural campuses, residential projects, and urban water management.
In addition to private practice, Schjetnan has held professorships and taught design workshops at multiple universities, including UNAM (1970-1972, 2001), the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1994, 1998, 2005); University of California, Berkeley (2001); and Universidad Iberoamericana (1979–1981). In 1995, Schjetnan was made a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. In 2025 Schjetnan and GDU were awarded the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize from Ʒһ.
