Alumni Better Living Through Landscape Architecture Stories You May Like Alum’s Business Is (Literally) Just Child’s Play Alum Is an Evangelist for the Wonders of National Parks—‘After Dark’ Preserving Central Park, Manhattan’s Urban Oasis Through decades of park design, Michael Van Valkenburgh ’73 connects urban communities with nature By Joe Wilensky It’s a gorgeous June morning at Brooklyn Bridge Park, a vibrant 85-acre public space that a couple of decades ago was an abandoned and blighted industrial waterfront dotted with dilapidated warehouses. On one tree-lined lawn, the famed bridge’s suspension towers provide a stately backdrop to children playing tug-of-war as parents cheer them on and toddlers explore nearby. Groups of giddy preschoolers in matching T-shirts tromp along lush, foliage-laden pathways on the way to nearby playgrounds; joggers and bicyclists cruise alongside the East River, with New York Harbor and Manhattan’s skyline beyond. Michael Van Valkenburgh ’73 is here too, taking a leisurely stroll. He knows every inch of this park—as he and his colleagues have spent the past 25 years planning, designing, and transforming it. (Robert Adam Mayer) He stops to admire some plantings, chats with a few gardeners, and marvels at the views of the river, the Statue of Liberty, and the waterfront from just a few of the park’s greenways, terraces, and piers. “You can come to a park and just enjoy being here,” he says. “I think the healing and the restorative power of that is just a great thing.” The CALS alum is the creative director of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), one of the country’s leading landscape architecture firms. He founded it in 1982 after graduating from Cornell with a degree in landscape architecture and earning an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 6 includes playgrounds and a splash area. (Lexi Van Valkenburgh) With offices in Brooklyn, Cambridge, Denver, and Los Angeles, the 100-employee firm specializes in parks that connect—and reconnect—people to nature. Its projects range from intimate gardens to vast, urban-scale design challenges and regional master plans that take decades to realize. You can come to a park and just enjoy being here. I think the healing and the restorative power of that is just a great thing. Van Valkenburgh’s meticulous landscapes are living ecosystems, often mitigating and serving as buffers to climate change and also providing floodwater management. MVVA’s notable work includes several projects in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; Chicago’s Maggie Daley Park, a 27-acre oasis atop a 4,000-car parking garage; Allegheny Riverfront Park, which reconnected Pittsburgh’s cultural district to its waterway; and the Gathering Place in Tulsa, OK—one of the largest public parks ever created with private funds. The firm has spent years restoring Wellesley College's Alumni Valley. (Alex MacLean) In a series of projects at Massachusetts’s Wellesley College spanning the past three decades, the firm restored a campus valley, turning parking lots back into wetlands. In St. Louis, MVVA won a competition to redesign the grounds around the Gateway Arch, reconnecting a major tourist attraction to the adjacent downtown from which it had been separated for decades. In Austin, TX, the firm is restoring a degraded creek and several underused city parks into a 1.5 mile-long chain of public green spaces and a circulation corridor. MVVA redesigned Cornell’s Bailey Plaza in 2007. (Elizabeth Felicella) And back at his alma mater, Van Valkenburgh transformed what was a large parking lot in front of Bailey Hall into a plaza that serves as a gathering place and connection to campus greenways. Playgrounds that surprise and delight—often with natural elements of the landscape as major features—can be found in most of Van Valkenburgh’s projects. “When we create natural areas in urban parks, we see them through many lenses,” he says, “but especially through the lens of children and the way they intuitively know how to play in just about any given space.” Connecting to nature, through parks and play Chicago’s 606, a park on a former elevated rail line.Gathering Place in Tulsa, OK. (Alex MacLean)Teardrop Park in Manhattan. (Elizabeth Felicella)Martin’s Park in Boston. (MVVA)Chelsea Cove, part of Hudson River Park on Manhattan’s West Side. (Elizabeth Felicella)Monk’s Garden, a park next to the Gardner Museum in Boston. (Alex MacLean) Van Valkenburgh grew up on a dairy farm in the Catskills, “a rural area with no significant playgrounds,” he says, beyond some rudimentary equipment outside the local elementary school. “So nature was my playground; the town dump was my playground,” he says. “Going after the milk cows and walking over a mountain with them through a sap bush and a pine forest was my playground.” On the Hill, Van Valkenburgh took many courses in horticulture—an approach he says was key to developing his professional identity. Stories You May Like Alum’s Business Is (Literally) Just Child’s Play Alum Is an Evangelist for the Wonders of National Parks—‘After Dark’ The park around the Gateway Arch in St. Louis now connects the landmark to the rest of the city. (Alex MacLean) “All of my training was side by side with people who weren’t remotely interested in being landscape architects,” he recalls. He has earned some of his field’s most prestigious honors, including the National Design Award in Environmental Design from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Arthur W. Brunner Prize in architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design since 1982, he now holds an endowed emeritus professorship. Land around a New Haven, CT, water treatment facility is now a nature preserve. (Elizabeth Felicella) Over the course of his long career, Van Valkenburgh notes, he has come to think more fully about the long-term care of the gardens and parks he creates. “You are making a landscape,” he says, “that will evolve through the guiding hands of gardeners and cultivators.” You are making a landscape that will evolve through the guiding hands of gardeners and cultivators. MVVA’s current and upcoming projects include parks in Buffalo and Detroit; a harbor basin-turned-park with a beach in Rotterdam, Netherlands; and the grounds around what will be the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Van Valkenburgh has authored Designing a Garden, about a project at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and has coedited a coffee-table book, Brooklyn Bridge Park, that documents the facility’s development and creation. A rendering of the firm's plans for the Obama Presidential Center's grounds. (MVVA) And he is currently at work on a book about trees, he says, “for people who know nothing about trees.” Back in Brooklyn, Van Valkenburgh stops at a point that overlooks several of the six piers—each larger than Manhattan’s entire Bryant Park—that have been transformed into meadows, fields, picnic areas, and playgrounds. “Twenty-five years ago,” he marvels, “we would have been standing inside an abandoned warehouse.” Waterloo Park in Austin, TX. (Waterloo Greenway Conservancy) Efforts began in 1999 with hundreds of public meetings and community conversations, assessments of the existing infrastructure and environmental needs of the waterfront, drafting of early design plans, and collaborations with experts across fields and government agencies. MVVA even ended up opening an office close to the park, ultimately shifting most of the employees from its Cambridge office—the better to meet local stakeholders in their own neighborhoods and to visit the site regularly. Construction began in 2008; the park began opening in phases in 2010 and was completed in 2021, now attracting an estimated 5 million people annually. (While the park’s construction was entirely publicly financed, its ongoing maintenance is funded by revenue from on-site housing and commercial development, managed by a city-controlled nonprofit, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation.) The park is filled with touches that are classic Van Valkenburgh—such as benches made from wood reclaimed from cold-storage warehouses and granite pavers reused from a city bridge. Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 1, with the Brooklyn and Manhattan spans in the background. (Etienne Frossard) The project has earned such accolades as the Brendan Gill Prize, which recognizes the work of art that “best captures the spirit and energy of New York City.” It has also entered NYC’s cultural landscape, hosting events like outdoor movie and fitness classes—even appearing on several New Yorker covers. Finishing his tour, Van Valkenburgh strolls along Pier 2, which is filled with handball, basketball, and pickleball courts, along with a roller rink, swings, and picnic tables. It’s in full use even on this balmy weekday morning, with teens and adults playing and taking in the views. “Parks are for the long haul,” he muses. “You’re part of making something that now belongs to somebody else.” Top: Aerial view of Brooklyn Bridge Park along the East River (Alex MacLean). All photos provided unless otherwise indicated. Published July 31, 2024 Comments Linda McCandless, Class of 1974 8 Aug, 2024 Nice story, Joe! Reply Kathryn J. Boor, Class of 1980 7 Oct, 2024 Fantastic story – so proud of our alums. Making the world a better place, each and every day. Reply Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Class Year Email * Save my name, email, and class year in this browser for the next time I comment. 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