Peter Jacobs '61
The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal, its highest honor, celebrates the achievement of excellence and innovation by visual artists and designers across Canada. The 2025 RCA Medal was awarded to Peter Jacobs CM, an architect and landscape architect who has specialized in the conservation and development of rural and northern landscapes and in urban landscape design, He is an Emeritus professor of the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture of the Université de Montréal, and recently-retired Chair of the Montreal Heritage Advisory Council.
A special greeting to my roommates at Antioch: Carl Randal, Peter Ogle, Ralph Pred, and Mario Capecchi.
The award itself:
Our first recipient is Peter Jacobs, for his career in architecture and landscape architecture, predominantly in Montreal and the North; for his parallel career as a teacher and scholar, most notably at Université de Montréal where he is now Professor Emeritus; for his service to community;and for his role as a Vice-President of the RCA over the last four years.
Peter most definitely embodies the values that the RCA aspires to. With the RCA Medal, we seek to honour those individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the social, financial, and/or professional status of the artist.
A distinguished educator, practitioner, and advocate of the cultural diversity and aesthetic beauty of the Canadian landscape, Peter Jacobs has devoted his career to assuring the conservation of Canada’s landscape heritage as well as the planning and design of new landscapes that reflect their cultural and bio-physical diversity in both rural and urban settings. He is a Fellow and Past President of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and served as Canada’s delegate to the International Federation of Landscape Architects.
Peter has also been a member of numerous scientific and professional editorial advisory committees, has written extensively on the dynamics of cultural landscapes and has been a member of numerous design juries. He continues to collaborate on planning and design projects, many of which have received professional awards.
He is amongst the pioneers of the sustainable development movement in Canada, insisting that the preoccupation with the conservation of nature be matched with an equal emphasis on the equitable distribution of its benefits.
In this regard, he has supported his academic and professional colleagues in numerous leadership roles as Chair of the Environmental Planning Commission, IUCN; Chair of the College of Senior Fellows, Dumbarton Oaks where he was appointed the first “Beatrix Farrand Distinguished Fellow”; Chair of the Kativik Environmental Quality Commission in Nunavik, Quebec; and more recently Chair of the Montreal Heritage Advisory Council.
His tenure as Vice-President of the RCA focused on the allocation of the Arthur Erickson and Ernest Annau Travel Study Scholarships and providing provocative criticism of the policy and programs of the Academy in the belief that continuing innovation was essential for an otherwise atypical organization to progress and to prosper.
His ‘provocative criticism’ – and devotion to ethical process – was delivered with astonishing wit and wisdom, and with the grace of a gazelle, something which is already sorely missed.