{"id":38646,"date":"2024-07-31T15:12:52","date_gmt":"2024-07-31T19:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/?p=38646"},"modified":"2024-07-31T15:12:54","modified_gmt":"2024-07-31T19:12:54","slug":"van-valkenburgh-landscape-architect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/van-valkenburgh-landscape-architect\/","title":{"rendered":"Better Living Through Landscape Architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Through decades of park design, Michael Van Valkenburgh \u201973 connects urban communities with nature<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Joe Wilensky<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a gorgeous June morning at Brooklyn Bridge Park<\/a>, a vibrant 85-acre public space that a couple of decades ago was an abandoned and blighted industrial waterfront dotted with dilapidated warehouses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

On one tree-lined lawn, the famed bridge\u2019s suspension towers provide a stately backdrop to children playing tug-of-war as parents cheer them on and toddlers explore nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s skyline beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Van Valkenburgh \u201973 is here too, taking a leisurely stroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He knows every inch of this park\u2014as he and his colleagues have spent the past 25 years planning, designing, and transforming it.<\/p>\n<\/div>

\"Michael

(Robert Adam Mayer)<\/em><\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s greenways, terraces, and piers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou can come to a park and just enjoy being here,\u201d he says. \u201cI think the healing and the restorative power of that is just a great thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The CALS alum is the creative director of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates<\/a> (MVVA), one of the country\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"playground
Brooklyn Bridge Park\u2019s Pier 6 includes playgrounds and a splash area. (Lexi Van Valkenburgh)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

With offices in Brooklyn, Cambridge, Denver, and Los Angeles, the 100-employee firm specializes in parks that connect\u2014and reconnect\u2014people to nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its projects range from intimate gardens to vast, urban-scale design challenges and regional master plans that take decades to realize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Van Valkenburgh\u2019s meticulous landscapes are living ecosystems, often mitigating and serving as buffers to climate change and also providing floodwater management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MVVA\u2019s notable work includes several projects in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; Chicago\u2019s Maggie Daley Park, a 27-acre oasis atop a 4,000-car parking garage; Allegheny Riverfront Park, which reconnected Pittsburgh\u2019s cultural district to its waterway; and the Gathering Place in Tulsa, OK\u2014one of the largest public parks ever created with private funds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n
\n
\"Aerial
The firm has spent years restoring Wellesley College’s Alumni Valley. (Alex MacLean)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In a series of projects at Massachusetts\u2019s Wellesley College spanning the past three decades, the firm restored a campus valley, turning parking lots back into wetlands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"View
MVVA redesigned Cornell\u2019s Bailey Plaza in 2007. (Elizabeth Felicella)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Playgrounds that surprise and delight\u2014often with natural elements of the landscape as major features\u2014can be found in most of Van Valkenburgh\u2019s projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we create natural areas in urban parks, we see them through many lenses,\u201d he says, \u201cbut especially through the lens of children and the way they intuitively know how to play in just about any given space.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Connecting to nature, through parks and play<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>
<\/div><\/div>
\"The
Chicago\u2019s 606, a park on a former elevated rail line.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\"Aerial
Gathering Place in Tulsa, OK. (Alex MacLean)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\"Winter
Teardrop Park in Manhattan. (Elizabeth Felicella)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\"Martin\u2019s
Martin\u2019s Park in Boston. (MVVA)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\"View
Chelsea Cove, part of Hudson River Park on Manhattan\u2019s West Side. (Elizabeth Felicella)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\"Aerial
Monk\u2019s Garden, a park next to the Gardner Museum in Boston. (Alex MacLean)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>
<\/div><\/section>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Van Valkenburgh grew up on a dairy farm in the Catskills, \u201ca rural area with no significant playgrounds,\u201d he says, beyond some rudimentary equipment outside the local elementary school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo nature was my playground; the town dump was my playground,\u201d he says. \u201cGoing after the milk cows and walking over a mountain with them through a sap bush and a pine forest was my playground.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the Hill, Van Valkenburgh took many courses in horticulture\u2014an approach he says was key to developing his professional identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Aerial
The park around the Gateway Arch in St. Louis now connects the landmark to the rest of the city. (Alex MacLean)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of my training was side by side with people who weren\u2019t remotely interested in being landscape architects,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u00a0has earned some of his field\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the faculty of Harvard\u2019s Graduate School of Design since 1982, he now holds an endowed emeritus professorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Michael
Land around a New Haven, CT, water treatment facility is now a nature preserve. (Elizabeth Felicella)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou are making a landscape,\u201d he says, \u201cthat will evolve through the guiding hands of gardeners and cultivators.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

You are making a landscape that will evolve through the guiding hands of gardeners and cultivators.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

MVVA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Van Valkenburgh has authored Designing a Garden<\/em><\/a>, about a project at Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and has coedited a coffee-table book, Brooklyn Bridge Park<\/em><\/a>, that documents the facility\u2019s development and creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"rendering
A rendering of the firm’s plans for the Obama Presidential Center’s grounds. (MVVA)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

And he is currently at work on a book about trees, he says, \u201cfor people who know nothing about trees.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Back in Brooklyn, Van Valkenburgh stops at a point that overlooks several of the six piers\u2014each larger than Manhattan\u2019s entire Bryant Park\u2014that have been transformed into meadows, fields, picnic areas, and playgrounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTwenty-five years ago,\u201d he marvels, \u201cwe would have been standing inside an abandoned warehouse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Waterloo
Waterloo Park in Austin, TX. (Waterloo Greenway Conservancy)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MVVA even ended up opening an office close to the park, ultimately shifting most of the employees from its Cambridge office\u2014the better to meet local stakeholders in their own neighborhoods and to visit the site regularly.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(While the park\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The park is filled with touches that are classic Van Valkenburgh\u2014such as benches made from wood reclaimed from cold-storage warehouses and granite pavers reused from a city bridge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Night
Brooklyn Bridge Park\u2019s Pier 1, with the Brooklyn and Manhattan spans in the background.\u00a0(Etienne Frossard)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The project has earned such accolades as the Brendan Gill Prize, which recognizes the work of art that \u201cbest captures the spirit and energy<\/a> of New York City.\u201d It has also entered NYC\u2019s cultural landscape<\/a>, hosting events like outdoor movie and fitness classes\u2014even appearing on several New Yorker<\/em> covers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s in full use even on this balmy weekday morning, with teens and adults playing and taking in the views.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cParks are for the long haul,\u201d he muses. \u201cYou\u2019re part of making something that now belongs to somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Top: Aerial view of Brooklyn Bridge Park along the East River (Alex MacLean). All photos provided unless otherwise indicated.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published July 31, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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