Michael R. Van Valkenburgh

 

Michael R. Van Valkenburgh is a Charles Eliot Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture, who has taught at the GSD since 1982. 

Valkenburghs company, 'Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' (MVVA), has offices in New York City and Cambridge. Van Valkenburgh has designed projects ranging from intimate gardens to urban design. A few examples of projects he has worked on are the Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City, the Lower Don Lands in Toronto and the Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. MVVA also designed the landscape for the Obama Presidential Centre in Chicago and created the master plan the 308-acre Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh. MVVA has received numerous design awards, including ASLA Firm of the Year in 2016 and the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2010 (Brooklyn Bridge Park).

In 2010 Van Valkenburgh became the second landscape architect in history to receive the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy. In 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the ASLA.

Van Valkenburgh earned a BS in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University and an MLA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2008, Yale University Press published Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes, a book on his firm’s work. Van Valkenburgh’s approach to creating landscapes and public spaces has also featured in published media articles in magazines such as Art in America and Harvard Magazine.