Michael Van Valkenburgh

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Profile

Michael Van Valkenburgh (b. 1950, Lexington, New York) is a landscape architect, founder and president of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) established in 1982, and the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), a department Van Valkenburgh chaired between 1991 and 1996. He has taught landscape architecture studios and lectures on the use of plants in the landscape at the GSD since 1982, served as program director from 1987-89 and for a term as chairman of the department from 1991-96. As the lead principal of MVVA Inc., Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) has over twenty years experience designing, building and restoring landscapes for a broad range of public, private and corporate clients across the United States, Canada, France, and Korea. Designing more than 350 landscapes, a wide rang of project types including public parks (eg.,Mill Race Park in Columbus, Indiana,); civic landscapes (e.g., the expansion of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden); and institutional landscapes (public realm plan for the BAM Cultural district in Brooklyn, New York). Van Valkenburghs variety of projects received numerous awards, including a Citation from the Progressive Architecture from the design of Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh; the Honor Award from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects for Mill Race Park in Columbus, Ind.; the Merit Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects for the Vera List Courtyard at the New School for Social Research in New York City and recipient of several other ASLA design awards. In 2003, Van Valkenburgh was awarded the Smithsonian Institution, National Design Award in environmental Design by the Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum. In addition, Van Valkenburgh was a Design Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and has received grants form the Graham Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts to support his design research. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in landscape architecture from Cornell University and a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the College of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana/ Champaign. After graduate school, he began teaching at the Radcliffe Seminars in Landscape Architecture. By 1988, he was a tenured professor at the GSD and eventually became chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. He has served on the jury for several memorial competitions including the World Trade Centers Site Memorial in 2003 where the winning design, ‘’Reflecting Absences,’’ was chosen.

Design Style

Van Valkenburgh shares Frederick Law Olmsted’s emphasis on the parks role as a democratic equalizer for the city; they share technical complexity and essentialness for a perceptive leveling of the constructed landscape upon the natural one; and recognize the need for the assortment, for diverse and countless landscapes rather than singular compositions. Van Valkenburgh likes to compare the firm’s approach to that of Alice Waters, the godmother of organic food and firmly defines himself in opposition to Modernist landscape architecture, the style of work made famous by designers like Peter Walker, George Hargreaves and Kathryn Gustafson, with preference for the neat and photographable. Van Valkenburgh is quick to separate his work form the classic designs of Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of landscape architecture in this country. Olmsted was the 19th- century inventor of Central and Prospect parks in New York and Franklin Park in Boston. Inventing his landscapes from whole cloth, all the ponds, plantings and hills in Central Park are his creation. Imitating the landscape you see in the work of an artist such as Claude Lorraine. Olmsted provided scenic viewing points, as well, from which the landscape seems to compose itself like a painting. Van Valkenburgh avoids that kind of proper Victorian production. He tries instead to make use of whatever he finds on the site or discovers in its past history. He does this to supplement his work with spectral memories of previous eras, to some extent creating diversity and variety. Van Valkenburgh addresses the matter of time and its spatial expression in his designs. Reflecting spatial and visual cues of natural processes, continuity with past practices, growth, change and fluctuation that applies to almost any landscape explored and the associated temporal changes. Van Valkenburgh's landscapes seem intentional by his use of rows, grids and quincunxes that boldly emphasize that his landscapes are ‘’manmade’’. He doesn’t depend on exotic plant examples for his effects, identifies species commonly found in the area and then makes them a relentless part of his design, layering his work with meaning to be discovered. His designs are also rooted in a sense of place and history of that place, knowledge of a place taken more deeply through the experience of the material, time and event than through visuals alone. Material, time and events are essential components to his designs, sense of time and memory reaches special depth due to his remarkable knowledge of plants and organic life, their various seasonal changes and modes of cultivation and growth. Also he has knowledge of precedents, what he calls ‘’revisiting ideas from the past’’. His firm is a deeply traditional practice less concerned with fashion and whom than with the frequent difficulty of constructing, a ground where culture can meet meaninglessly with the life and process of nature. This article was written by one of his minions.

Garden Style

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Works Cited

Edited By James Grayson Trulove. Ten Landscapes :Stephen Stimson Associates. Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers, 2002.

Judith B. Tankard, Michael R. Van Valkenburgh, Foreword Jane Brown. Gertrude Jekyl: A Vision of Garden and Wood. New York: Harry N. Abrams, INC. / Sagapress, INC. Timber Press, 1990

Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Design with the Land :Landscape Architecture of Michael Van Valkenburgh. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

Metropolismagazine: The Active Edge. Ed.Andrew Blum. Feb. 2006. http://www.bbpc.net/download.cfm?DownloadFile=DFE928B9-3048-2C77-F2D0E3FA04959353.

A View of Varied Work by a Landscape Designer. Michael Van Valkenburgh gets showcase at Harvard Ed. Robert Cambell. May 2006. Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2006/05/14/a_view_of_varied_work_by_a_landscape_designer/?page=full.

Michael Van Valkenburg: Style and Design the Creative Edge. Ed. Paul Warchol 2004 : Jerry Speier 2005. Time Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/2005/style/041805/who/9.html

New York - Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Brooklyn Bridge Park seems destined to become New York's third great urban landscape. Ed. Andrew Blum. Aug 2006. Metropolismagazine. http://www.europaconcorsi.com/db/rec/inbox.php?id=9885

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