Michael Robert Van Valkenburgh (born September 5, 1951) is an American
landscape architect and educator. He has worked on a wide variety of projects in the United States, Canada, Korea, and France, including public parks, college campuses, sculpture gardens, city courtyards, corporate landscapes, private gardens, and urban master plans.
Van Valkenburgh is the Charles Eliot Professor of Practice, Emeritus at the
Graduate School of Design at
Harvard University. His career at the GSD began in 1982; he served as program director from 1987 to 1989, and as Chairman of the Department of
Landscape Architecture from 1991 to 1996.
Design approach and inspiration
Van Valkenburgh describes his work as an exploration of the living qualities of the landscape medium and an attempt to emancipate landscape architecture from a its traditionally subsidiary relationship to
architecture. His designs are based on a sensitivity to the particular qualities of each project site and thus do not necessarily resemble one another with respect to form, details, or imagery. According to fellow landscape architect
James Corner, Van Valkenburgh's work demonstrates "that the knowledge of a place derives more deeply through experience of material, time, and event, than through visuality alone, and that landscape experience is fuller and more profound when it accrues through inhabitation than through the immediacy of the image or the objectification of the new."[1]
As a landscape architect, he has been influenced by his upbringing in an agricultural setting and his education at Cornell University during the 1970s—in particular his exposure to
Ian McHarg's ground-breaking book Design with Nature. Van Valkenburgh has been recognized for his ability to successfully integrate new methods of sustainable design and ecological renewal into the experience of the places he designs, making sustainability part of the beauty of a place that educates visitors and raises environmental awareness.[2]
Crediting artist
Robert Smithson's writings on Frederick Law Olmsted and the "landscape dialectic" as a source of inspiration,[3] Van Valkenburgh's landscapes are sometimes completely original explorations of naturalism and the constructed urban landscape (for instance,
Teardrop Park and
Brooklyn Bridge Park) but he has also completed many sensitive historic landscape restorations including
Harvard Yard;
Marion Square in
Charleston, South Carolina; and several works at
Wellesley College. According to landscape theorist
Anita Berrizbeitia, in her introduction to a book of essays on the work of MVVA, "His parks and public open spaces are based on the conviction that not only can the power of nature and the power of the man-made coexist, but they are the better for doing so."[4]
Van Valkenburgh approaches his designs in such a way that the spirit of place is at the forefront and the center of the design. To create a space that reflects the desired future for an area and give it a spirit of hope and progress requires a lot of foresight to the desired effect. Van Valkenburgh designs his projects in a way that reflect the desired future of the area in the spirit of the place they are striving for. His projects often begin with ordinary places that he is able to rejuvenate into a place that cause people to look past what it was and instead look to the future of the park as well as the surrounding city because of the spirit of the place Michael Van Valkenburgh has instilled in the space with his adaptive reuse of this post industrial wasteland and his intentional intertwining of it with nature.[5][6]
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.
Founding Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. (MVVA) in 1982, he currently leads the firm with five fellow partners: Laura Solano,
Matthew Urbanski, Paul Seck, Gullivar Shepard, and Emily Mueller De Celis. The firm has 100 employees and three offices, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Brooklyn, New York and Denver, Colorado. MVVA has completed a broad range of landscape design, construction, and restoration projects in both the public and private realms. To date, MVVA has completed over 350 projects, and has cultivated an expertise in
sustainability, soil toxicity, and waterfront infrastructure. The firm collaborates frequently with artists, including
Maya Lin,
Ann Hamilton,
Martin Puryear,
Mel Bochner, Meg Webster, and
Oscar Tuazon.
Michael Van Valkenburgh devotes himself to design work and teaching. He has a National Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Board certification and is a registered Landscape Architect in twenty different states. In 2002, he was a speaker in the Spotlight on Design Lecture Series at the
National Building Museum. In 2003, Van Valkenburgh served on the selection jury of the
World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition and won the National Design Award for Environmental Design from the
Smithsonian Institution's
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. In November 2004, Van Valkenburgh was personally thanked by First Lady Laura Bush for his design for the renovation of
Pennsylvania Avenue in
Washington, D.C. In 2007, Van Valkenburgh was asked to present the Rutgers Department of Landscape Architecture Margaret O. Cekada Memorial Lecture. In 2010, he was awarded two major prizes: the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture, from the American Academy of Arts and letters, for contributions to architecture as an art, and the
Brendan Gill Prize from the
Municipal Arts Society of New York City, which recognized Brooklyn Bridge Park as the work of art that best captured the spirit and energy of New York City.
Publications
Books
Designing a Garden: Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Michael Van Valkenburgh, essay by Laurie Olin, Monacelli Press, 2019
Foreword, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (by James Corner and Alexander S. MacLean), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
Design with the Land: Landscape Architecture of Michael Van Valkenburgh, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994
Gertrude Jekyll: A Vision of Garden and Wood (with Judith B. Tankard), Sagapress, 1989.
The Flower Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and Their Twentieth-Century Transformations, Design Quarterly 137, MIT Press for the Walker Art Center, 1987.
Transforming the American Garden: 12 New Landscape Designs (with Margaret B. Reeve, and Jory Johnson), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1986
Built Landscapes: Gardens in the Northeast, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, 1984
Articles
"Built Landscapes, Ecologies and Re-defining 'Preservation'", CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship, National Park Service, v.7, n.2, Summer 2010
"Faculty project: Teardrop Park [Battery Park City, New York]", Harvard Design Magazine, n.12 (Fall 2000), pp. 92–93
"Ein Hof mit Streifen", Garten + Landschaft, v.106, n.2 (Feb. 1996), pp. 26–28
"Restoring The Harvard Yard Landscape", Arnoldia, Spring 1994 (with
Peter Del Tredici)
"Conceiving a Courtyard", Places, Spring 1990 (with Carol Doyle Van Valkenburgh)
"Best laid plan: Gertrude Jekyll's brilliant planting and Edwin Lutyen's architectural mastery make Hestercombe a superb example of collaborative garden design". House & garden, v.161, n.3 (Mar. 1989), pp. 150–157 (with Carol Doyle Van Valkenburgh)
"The Flower gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and their twentieth-century transformations" Design Quarterly, no.137 (1987), pp. 1–30
"Notations of nature's process", Landscape Architecture, v.76, no.1 (Jan.-Feb. 1986), pp. 40–45
"Two Views of Landscape Design: A.E. Bye and Dan Kiley," Orion Quarterly, Spring 1985.
"Built Landscapes at Wave Hill," New York Times, August 11, 1984.
"Ice: To Freeze on Walls," Landscape Architecture, January 1984.
"Garden Spot for Half a House," Landscape Architecture, March 1981.
"Principles for the Design of a Mixed Use Development in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts," Cambridge Redevelopment Authority, October 1978.
"Grade School Children's Use of and Attitudes about Two Play Areas in Carle Park, Urbana, Illinois," Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the Environmental Design Research Association, Washington, D.C., April 1978.
Publications about Michael Van Valkenburgh and MVVA
Amidon, J., Michael Van Valkenburgh/Allegheny Riverfront Park: Source Books in Landscape Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, 2005
Berrizbeitia, A., Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes, Yale University Press, 2009
Blum, A., "The Active Edge", Metropolis, March 2006
Werthmann, C., Green Roof - A Case Study: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' Design for the Headquarters of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Princeton Architectural Press, 2007
Mitani, T., "American Landscape Architecture", Space Design (Japan), Summer 1998
^Design with the Land, Landscape Architecture of Michael Van Valkenburgh. New York: Harvard Graduate School of Design, Princeton Architectural Press. 1994. pp. 5–8.
ISBN1-56898-022-1.
^Meyer, Elizabeth K. (2008). "Sustaining Beauty, The Performance of Appearance, a Manifesto in Three Parts". Journal of Landscape Architecture. Spring (1): 6–23.
doi:
10.1080/18626033.2008.9723392.
S2CID142514457.
^Berrizbeitia, Anita (2009). Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Reconstructing Urban Landscapes. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 7.
ISBN9780300135855.