The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
A Park Grows in Brooklyn
Michael van Valkenburgh takes back New York’s waterfront.
By Nicholas DeRenzo
Van Valkenburgh’s design style is hard to pin down. “One thing about Michael is that his work has never been formulaic,” Berrizbeitia says. Van Valkenburgh actually bristles, for example, at the suggestion that he might have a distinct style. “My style is that the landscape is somehow meaningfully appropriate to where it is,” he says, a slightly cryptic explanation. He never approaches a project with an established artistic style. Each location, with its thousands of years of unique history, requires design that speaks to these changes – in many cases, from a wilderness to an inhabited settlement to an urban industrial zone to an abandoned post-industrial lot. He laughingly refers to himself as a painter who changes from realist to abstract expressionist from one day to the next depending on which style is appropriate for the job. “There are larger responsibilities that landscape-making takes on – appropriateness, continuity – and these things are not necessarily best solved by a singular aesthetic,” he says. For example, Battery Park City was created out of fill material on the Hudson River, and the dramatic bluestone rock wall in Teardrop Park is meant to evoke the Hudson River Valley further upstream. The wall is included not because it is part of Van Valkenburgh’s bag of tricks but because it speaks directly to this specific landscape’s history.
Van Valkenburgh’s designs have often been defined by the challenges of location which he has had to overcome. In Pittsburgh, his two-tiered Allegheny Riverfront Park, completed in 1998, helped reconnect the city’s cultural district to the river, which had been cut off from the city by expressways. The plants and construction materials Van Valkenburgh used, all traditionally found in Pittsburgh’s existing public spaces, are resistant to both floods and icy conditions. At Wellesley College, Van Valkenburgh restored a landscape that had previously been used for industrialized natural gas pumping and an immense parking lot built over a toxic brownfield. By grappling with the valley’s history of toxicity and replacing the site’s toxic soil, he has returned a previously unusable dead space into a thriving new ecosystem.
In most of his design projects, Van Valkenburgh redefines the importance of landscape architecture as a tool for urban problem solving. “Landscape architects had been perceived as something that comes at the very end of a project, to decorate, to put the foundation planting, to make it pretty, to make it colorful with flowers,” says Berrizbeitia. “He totally turned it around.” Without his plantings in Wellesley or Pittsburgh or now the Brooklyn waterfront, the postindustrial lots would remain uninhabitable, ugly, and unusable. Van Valkenburgh has shown that landscape can be a crucial component of urban planning—not a decorative last step.
Conversation with Michael Van Valkenburgh is a dizzying mixture of the whimsical and the highbrow. He often peppers his conversation with oddly charming observations and frequent references to figures like playwright Tom Stoppard, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, novelist Joseph O’Neill, and artist Robert Smithson. But between these references, he will get distracted by an immense grey freighter that towers over Governors Island or the Staten Island ferry, which he calls “one of the most beautiful things in the city.” The orange boat is not taking its usual path southward towards Staten Island, he notices. Instead it glides eastward along the northern shore of Governors Island. Van Valkenburgh half-jokingly suggests hijacking as a potential explanation. This must be the expansive, reference-filled imagination necessary to design such massive and creative undertakings.
Michael Van Valkenburgh was born in 1951 and raised on a modest family farm in the Catskills town of Lexington, New York. In addition to running the farm, his father worked as a manager of operations at the nearby Hunter Mountain ski resort, and his mother was a high school secretary. Van Valkenburgh expresses indebtedness to his childhood surroundings, which he calls “magical” and “extraordinarily beautiful.”
“My father was not intentionally poetic,” he says. “He was a working guy, but he used to talk about how the farm looked, the shapes of fields. There was actually a deep poetry to the simplicity that he used. I was imbued as a young child with the sense that landscape was a medium that you could work with, that it was malleable, that it could be purposeful.” Nevertheless, Van Valkenburgh did not intend to study landscape design in college. He was a first semester history major at SUNY Oneonta when he enrolled in an ecology class. The professor, who was about to retire, spent every week lamenting that he had not pursued landscape architecture instead of ecology.
“My antenna went up,” Van Valkenburgh remembers, “and I was like, ‘Landscape architecture? What is that?’” He remembers reading Ian McHarg’s 1969 Design with Nature, in which the author set forth an ecological view of landscape planning. The fiery Scottish landscape architect complained that overdevelopment was rapidly poisoning the environment. He prescribed a new approach to design that kept ecological processes in mind and did not attempt to conquer nature. Van Valkenburgh was intrigued. He soon transferred to the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1973. He went on to receive a master’s in Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977.