Sad news from the Kiwis today; Charlie Challenger, the father of New Zealand landscape architecture, passed away September 21 at his home. He was 84.
Challenger, originally from the UK, established New Zealand’s first landscape architecture program in 1969. He went on to teach the first generation of LAs in the country, and helped to found the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects (NZILA).
Scoop, a New Zealand online new publication, recalls that
Landscape architecture was not understood in New Zealand and most often perceived as a fancy form of gardening. Charlie recalls that the first graduates had to be “apostles who had to sell themselves to people who were suspicious of them.”
Click here to read the whole article, and here [pdf link] to download the August 2007 issue of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) newsletter featuring an article on Challenger (which starts on page 6).
