As one of this year's six Chrysler awardees, he joins a list of prominent American designers who have made their names by elegantly exploring issues of contemporary life. Apple's Industrial Design Group won in 1993. The team that designed the Mars Pathfinder won in 1998. The award has been bestowed upon plenty of architects, product and graphic designers, but in the eight years of its existence, landscape architects have been few and far between. It's partly a problem of definition.
Most people equate landscape with scenery, a backdrop for living our lives.
That's what movies, marketing campaigns and the media dish out. Bucolic but hardly earth-shattering stuff. The definition is too passive, too narrow for Corner's liking. His mission is to move the background into the foreground, to start landscape architects creating the future rather than repairing the past. He wants to go beyond preserving parks and rainforests, beyond creating critter-friendly habitats and cheery outdoor entertainment spots.