When CSLA Fellow Heinz Berger described his early days in Vancouver, and the growing pressures of his landscape design and contracting business, it was Einar Ibsen Brodersen whose story he’d begin to tell. “I was desperate for help,” he remembered, working seven-days-a-week, when he found of “a Norwegian landscape architect, named Einar Ibsen Brodersen, working temporarily in a New Westminster jewelry store… I was impressed by his professional knowledge….he also spoke German… I liked him and hired him. This was fantastic, because he took over all the office work, and most of the design.”
Indeed Brodersen, who had arrived in Canada in his early 40s, (c1952), had long experience. Born in Oslo (1908), he was first schooled at Norway’s Horticulture and Landscape College (1935), then worked in landscape construction before earning his landscape architect’s degree in Dahlem, Berlin.
In just a few years, Berger made Brodersen his partner in Berger & Brodersen Landscape Architects and Consultants. By 1957, Berger had also acquired a nursery business in Burnaby, Berger & Smith Landscaping Ltd., and Brodersen became its office manager and designer.
The businesses flourished, and in the late 1950s, the two LAs began to meet regularly with five other Vancouver landscape architects at the Cheshire Cheese Restaurant in Kerrisdale. The group was later invited to join the American Institute of Landscape Architects, forming a B.C. chapter.
In 1961, Berger sold his companies to become Director of Parks for West Vancouver. Brodersen remained with the landscaping firm in Burnaby until 1964, then followed that with years of private practice.
The busy decade saw the rise of the profession in the province, as the Kerrisdale LAs continued their advocacy. Illustrious CSLA Fellow John Neill recalls the pioneers. “Phil Tattersfield, Clive Justice, Harry Webb, Bill Livingstone, Bob Savery, Michael Pope, Ibsen Brodersen, Heinz Berger…and me…this was really the core of the early group who helped form the B.C. association.” The BCSLA was the first provincial group in the country to organize provincially in 1964.
Ibsen Brodersen thereafter joined the CSLA as well (1970), and for his long and important service to the development of landscape architecture in the west, was inducted as a Fellow in 1974. He died some five years later. “Ibsen was a very dedicated person in the profession,” wrote Neill, “a Norwegian to the end.”
*Einar Ibsen Brodersen’s name sometimes appears as Broderson.
Sources
“Development of the Profession in British Columbia,” by John Neill. Fifty Years of Landscape Architecture in Canada, 1934-84, Cecelia Paine (Editor).
An Adventure on Two Continents – Ending in a Place of Excellence – West Vancouver. Memoirs of Heinz Berger.