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 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.

Michael Van Valkenburgh was born on September 5, 1951, and grew up in Lexington, New York, where his family owned a small dairy farm.

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.

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 a Master of Landscape Architecture from the College of Fine Arts at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977.

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. In the early years of his practice, Van Valkenburgh specialized in seasonally dynamic hedge gardens and ice walls.

He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts which allowed him to experiment with ice as a material in landscape design.

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 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."

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.

His practice has won many national awards for their designs, including 19 from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

These awards include:

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.

Blueprints at Addison Circle is a steel sculpture located in Addison, Texas designed in conjunction with artist Mel Chin dedicated on April 13, 2000.

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.