Michael Van Valkenburgh

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Michael R. Van Valkenburgh
Born 1951
Occupation Landscape Architect

Michael R. Van Valkenburgh is an American Landscape Architect and educator who currently resides in the West Village of New York City. 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, and private gardens

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[edit] Life and career

[edit] Early Years and Schooling

Michael Van Valkenburgh was born in 1951 and grew up in Lexington, New York. He worked on his family's small dairy farm growing up and says that his childhood in this agricultural community is what influenced his design style. In his early, preoccupation years, Michael Van Valkenburg worked with seasonally dynamic hedge gardens and ice walls. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts which allowed him to study the effects of climate on ice formations. M. Van Valkenburgh received a Bachelor of Science from the College of Agriculture at Cornell University in 1973 and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the College of Fine Arts at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977. In addition, M. Van Valkenburgh received the 1988 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

[edit] Teaching career

Michael Van Valkenburgh is a Professor of Practice at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He teaches a design studio once a year. His teaching career began in 1975 when he became an instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign then held a visiting critic position at the Rhode Island School of Design. He arrived to educated at Harvard University in 1982. From 1987 to 1989 he held the directorship of the Landscape Architecture Program at Harvard. From 1991 to 1996 he sat as the Chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard.

[edit] Design Style and Inspiration

Michael Van Valkenburgh describes his work as an exploration of the living qualties of the landscape and an attempt to emancipate landscape architecture from its derivative relationship to architecture. A client of M. Van Valkenburgh's describes his designs as having a new meaning each time they are experienced and each part of the landscape seeming intended. His designs are based in an appreciation of the particular qualities of each specific site and thus do not necessarily resemble one another stylistically. M. Van Valkenburgh was influenced by his youth in an agricultural setting and many aspects of the work of Frederick Law Olmsted. He was also inspired by the book Design and Nature, written by Ian L. McHarg. This book explains the ecological movement of man made landscapes becoming a fusion of nature as art and conscience. M. Van Valkenburgh's landscapes are sometimes completely original explorations of naturalism and artifciality, for instance at Teardrop Park, or Brooklyn Bridge Park, but he has also completed many sensitive landscape restorations including Harvard Yard, Marion Square Park in Charleston, South Carolina, and several works at Wellesley College.

[edit] Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.

Michael Van Valkenburgh founded the Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. (MVVA)in 1982. Firm principals include Laura Solano, and Mathew Urbanski. The company is a successful Landscape Architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City. Since the company was founded it 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 won numerous national awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects. MVVA is known for their knowledge concerning issues of sustainability, challenges of soil toxicity, and maintaining the integrity of a designs history and context. The firm also collaoborates frequently with artistis. M. Van Valkenburgh and MVVA have won many national awards for their designs.

Some of these awards include:

  • Honor Award from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects for Mill Race Park in Columbus, Indiana, 1993
  • Design Merit Award, ASLA for the Vera List Courtyard at the New School for Social Research, New York, NY, 1998
  • Planning and Analysis Merit Award, ASLA, for Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 1999
  • Citation from Progressive Architecture for Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 2002
  • Design Merit Award, ASLA, Allegheny Riverfront Park, Pittsburgh, PA, 2002
  • Places Magazine/EDRA Place Design Award, Allegheny Riverfront Park, Pittsburgh, PA, 2002
  • Design Merit Award, ASLA, Spider Island, Chicago Botanic Garden, Glenncoe, IL, 2002
  • Environmental Design Award, National Design Awards, Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 2003
  • Design Merit Award, ASLA, for the Garden on Turtle Creek, Dallas, TX 2004
  • Juror, for World Trade Center Memorial Competition 2004
  • Design Honor Award, ASLA, for the Herman Miller Factory Landscape, Cherokee County, GA 2005
  • Design Honor Award, ASLA, for Tahari Courtyards, Millburn, NJ, 2006
  • Design Excellence Award, ASLA, for Alumnae Valley at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, 2006

[edit] Recent Information

Today Michael Van Valkenburgh is continuing the legacy through his design and his teaching. He has a National Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Board certification and is a registered Landscape Architect in twenty different states. He currently listed as a potential designer for the National Museum of Gardens. In 2003, Van Valkenburgh served on the selection jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition and won the National Design Award in Environmental Design by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. M. Van Valkenburgh was thanked by Mrs. Laura Bush for his design for the renovation of Pennsylvania Avenue in November of 2004. In 2007 Michael Van Valkenburgh was asked to present the Rutgers Department of Landscape Architecture Margaret O. Cekada Memorial Lecture.

[edit] Publications

  • Taking Measures Across the American Landscape

M. Van Valkenburgh, A. S. MacLean, J. Corner

  • Ten Landscapes

Stephen Stimson Associates M. Van Valkenburgh, J. Amidon, J. Trulove, C. Mayer Rockport Publishers; 2002

  • American landscape architecture

in: Space design M. Schwartz, P. Walker, G. Hargreaves, M. Van Valkenburgh, S. R. Frey, S. Miyagi

  • Best laid plan: Gertrude Jekyll's brilliant planting and Edwin Lutyen's architectural mastery make Hestercombe a superb example of collaborative garden design

in: House & Garden M. Van Valkenburgh, C. D. Van Valkenburgh

  • The Flower gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and their twentieth-century transformations

in: Design quarterly, M. Van Valkenburgh

  • Michael

J. Gilette, Landscape Architecture Magazine, February 1998

  • The Active Edge

A. Blum, Metropolis, March 2006

  • Built Landscapes: Gardens in the Northeast

M. Van Valkenburgh, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, 1984

  • Design with the Land: Landscape Architecture of Michael Van Valkenburgh

M. Van Valkenburgh, with essays by Peter Rose, Will Miller, James Corner, Paula Deitz, John Beardsley, and Mildred Friedman, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994

  • Michael Van Valkenburgh/Allegheny Riverfront Park: Source Books in Landscape Architecture

J. Amidon, Princeton Architectural Press, 2005

  • Green Roof - A Case Study: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' Design for the Headquarters of the American Society of Landscape Architects

C. Werthmann, Princeton Architectural Press, 2007

[edit] Notable works

The Kraus Campo on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University.
The Kraus Campo on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University.

A list of notable works by Michael Van Valkenburgh and his company Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, with their completion dates follows:

[edit] Works In Progress

[edit] Image Links

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links