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Michael Van Valkenburgh
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Michael Van Valkenburgh
Michael Robert Van Valkenburgh (born September 5, 1951) is an American landscape architect and educator. He has worked on a wide variety of projects – including public parks, college campuses, sculpture gardens, corporate landscapes, private gardens, and urban master plans – in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. He has taught at Harvard's Graduate School of Design Since 1982 and served as chair of its Landscape Architecture Department from 1991 to 1996.
Michael Van Valkenburgh was born on September 5, 1951, and grew up in Lexington, New York, where his family owned a small dairy farm. He has said: "My earliest childhood memories involve powerful images of landscapes. I grew up among open fields, planted hedgerows, and orchards chiseled into the rolling, otherwise-forested Catskill Mountains. And so landscapes made by human hands and by the indomitable power of nature have lived side-by-side in my imagination."
Van Valkenburgh received a Bachelor of Science from the College of Agriculture at Cornell University in 1973, studied photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1974 to 1975, and earned an MFA in landscape architecture from the College of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977. The focus of his graduate study was environmental psychology, specifically the relationship between people and landscapes. He worked at Carr, Lynch, Associates, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1979 until 1982, when he founded his own firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts which allowed him to experiment with ice as a material in landscape design. In 1988, Van Valkenburgh received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.
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.
Van Valkenburgh describes his work as an exploration of the living qualities of the landscape and an attempt to bring the power of landscape experience into everyday life. 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."
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.
Crediting artist Robert Smithson's writings on Frederick Law Olmsted and the "landscape dialectic" as a source of inspiration, 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."
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.
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Michael Van Valkenburgh
Michael Robert Van Valkenburgh (born September 5, 1951) is an American landscape architect and educator. He has worked on a wide variety of projects – including public parks, college campuses, sculpture gardens, corporate landscapes, private gardens, and urban master plans – in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. He has taught at Harvard's Graduate School of Design Since 1982 and served as chair of its Landscape Architecture Department from 1991 to 1996.
Michael Van Valkenburgh was born on September 5, 1951, and grew up in Lexington, New York, where his family owned a small dairy farm. He has said: "My earliest childhood memories involve powerful images of landscapes. I grew up among open fields, planted hedgerows, and orchards chiseled into the rolling, otherwise-forested Catskill Mountains. And so landscapes made by human hands and by the indomitable power of nature have lived side-by-side in my imagination."
Van Valkenburgh received a Bachelor of Science from the College of Agriculture at Cornell University in 1973, studied photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1974 to 1975, and earned an MFA in landscape architecture from the College of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977. The focus of his graduate study was environmental psychology, specifically the relationship between people and landscapes. He worked at Carr, Lynch, Associates, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1979 until 1982, when he founded his own firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts which allowed him to experiment with ice as a material in landscape design. In 1988, Van Valkenburgh received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.
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.
Van Valkenburgh describes his work as an exploration of the living qualities of the landscape and an attempt to bring the power of landscape experience into everyday life. 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."
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.
Crediting artist Robert Smithson's writings on Frederick Law Olmsted and the "landscape dialectic" as a source of inspiration, 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."
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.