michael van valkenburgh

Michael Van Valkenburgh was amazed. Standing on the lush bank of one of the wetlands he’d carefully designed in Brooklyn Bridge Park, he spotted it–a goldfish darting through the water. The tiny, orange intruder was an invasive addition to an ecosystem that Van Valkenburgh had spent decades crafting, often with his hands in the dirt. As one of the lead designers of Brooklyn Bridge Park, he was at the helm of transforming an abandoned shipping yard into an 85-acre stretch of green space along the East River. More than five million people visit Brooklyn Bridge Park every year–and now, apparently, so do goldfish.

“I was out of my mind,” the 73-year-old says, remembering the day.

Van Valkenburgh is one of the most influential landscape architects in America. In addition to Brooklyn Bridge Park, his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, has designed and won awards for the Lower Don Lands in Toronto, Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh, and the restoration of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, among others. Most recently, his firm was tasked with guiding a community-driven initiative to transform a 100-acre waterfront site in Buffalo, New York, into a park and wildlife habitat. They were also commissioned to design the landscape for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

But despite these accolades, or maybe because of them, Van Valkenburgh has a presence that suggests he’s never quite at rest, always in motion–even while sitting down. His white hair is wild and mussed, as if he’s just pulled off a winter hat, which could give off the impression that he doesn’t care much about the small stuff. But his work tells a different story. In every project, you can trace the signature of someone who cares deeply, almost obsessively, about the smallest details. “Evidently, neighbors who were moving away had put the goldfish in our designed wetlands.”

Over time the goldfish proliferated, drawing the attention of a great blue heron–a four-foot-tall bird with a wide wingspan that stops by regularly to feast on the fish.

“It’s insane,” Van Valkenburgh says, “Right in the middle of New York City, this massive heron drops into this tiny wetland like a helicopter, looking for snacks.”

The goldfish moment captures the essence of Van Valkenburgh’s work, a lifetime of meticulously designing parks and landscapes only to watch as nature and people (and rogue goldfish) reshape his projects in ways he never expected.

Take the rhododendrons that were planted in Brooklyn Bridge Park. “I would have said that’s the worst plant to put in Brooklyn Bridge Park ever.” But he didn’t say that. “Because if I turn into that guy who bitches and moans about the decisions they make then they’ll never ask me anything.” So he bit his tongue, stood back, and watched. “And you want to know something? Ten years later, those rhododendrons have been kind of reshaped by the wind and they’ve grown kind of leggy and reachy and I kind of like them. I kind of like them.”

Van Valkenburgh’s connection to landscape began in childhood on a dairy farm in the Catskills. One of his earliest memories is, at age three, being bundled into his father’s coat as they went out in the middle of a storm to close the barn doors. He remembers how even through the storm’s darkness, wind, and rain, he knew where he was on the property. “I could smell the acid scent of the boxelder tree and hear its branches rubbing together,” he recalls. “At three years old, that tree already had meaning for me. It was part of who I was.”

The idea of being connected to trees–even knowing them by smell, by sound–feels like a fading art for most people. How many of us can even name the trees in our neighborhoods? But Van Valkenburgh doesn’t think you have to grow up surrounded by nature to feel that innate connection to it. “I suspect that you could grow up in a totally artificial environment, like sometime in the future where babies are born on spaceships, and come to earth and see a tree and just be completely blown away by it and connected,” he says. “We’re just wired for it.”

This deep, almost instinctual connection to trees followed him on a trip to Paris as a teenager, where he accidentally wandered into the Tuileries one night. “It was overwhelming,” he says. “It was the volume of the trees. It was their quality as a designed landscape that impacted me.” The Tuileries, originally designed by the royal landscape architect André Le Nôtre in 1664, are defined by their order–a single species of tree planted in precise rows with flowers that bloom white in the spring. “Not everybody loves horse chestnut–I happen to love it.” But what really impressed Van Valkenburgh was the precision and scale of a palace garden turned into a public space. He had never seen anything like that in an American park. “That’s a nice bonus for a guy who doesn’t yet know that he wants to be a landscape architect.”

At the time, Van Valkenburgh was a history major. But just a few months after the visit to the Tuileries, he was sitting in an ecology class when the professor held up the book Design with Nature, a foundational text in the world of landscape architecture. “He said, ‘If I had to do it all over again,” Van Valkenburgh remembers, “I wouldn’t be an ecologist. I would be a landscape architect.’” That got his attention, and within six weeks he’d applied to transfer to an undergraduate program at Cornell University to study landscape architecture.

Fast forward to 1989, and Van Valkenburgh was back in the Tuileries–this time as a landscape architect. He and his colleagues were the only American team invited to an international competition to redesign the Tuileries and its connection to the Louvre. By then, Van Valkenburgh had returned to the park many times, always drawn back by the volume of the trees. “Vastness is a very important word for me,” he says. “Boundlessness and circumstances that allow people to relax and disconnect.”

Creating spaces where people can connect with nature and let go is Van Valkenburgh’s life’s work. “It’s a lot being a human being,” he says. “Being alive is this unfolding series of things, one thing after another.” He bristles at the idea of landscape as an art form but believes in its power to ground us. “Experiencing landscape is ultimately very powerful because it positions us with the constantly evolving state of things.” A park becomes a mirror to the transformations we go through in our own lives. “When you go to a landscape and it’s extremely beautiful, it’s very life affirming. But it’s not the same when you go the next day. There’s something else to love, something else that takes the place of the first snow on brown leaves. It’s a one time thing.”

There’s a tension between accepting change and pursuing a vision, especially if you’re someone who’s made a career out of shaping nature. While he’s learned to let go, Van Valkenburgh is still intensely involved in his projects–walking footpaths before they’re built, standing over scale models in the dark morning hours before the office fills up, and stepping outside of himself enough to imagine what it will be like for people experiencing a space for the first time.

Now at 73 he’s building gardens that will evolve in ways he’ll never get to see. “No matter how much I stretch my age trajectory, I’m never going to see this garden in its old age, right?” In the garden he and his wife have cultivated for the past 35 years, they planted saplings and watched them grow into big trees. “But that’s not in my life anymore. That’s not going to happen again.”

There’s no way to stretch time, but the past has a way of weaving itself back into the present. One of his favorite projects, Teardrop Park in Lower Manhattan near Ground Zero, is a nod to his childhood. Opened in 2004, the park is a pocket of woodland inside the city with tall grass, a grotto, fallen logs, and a rugged bluestone ice wall that kids climb up and down.

Did he think about his childhood while he was designing it? “Fleetingly,” he says.“Tim Carey, who hired us, said, ‘I did some research on you, and I know you grew up Upstate. What I want this park to do is give kids down here some of that experience you and I had growing up.’”

Van Valkenburgh and his team designed the park with a marsh of native New York plants, low-hanging canopies, shifting boulders, and hidden trails–all callbacks to the wildness of Upstate–but he didn’t dwell on the past. Instead, he was thinking about the future, about the children who would use it. “I had little grandkids who were going to use this park. I was thinking more about how you think about something when you’re making it for somebody else.”

Over twenty years on, the park has continued to change and evolve. It’s always becoming something new, and that’s what Van Valkenburgh loves most about landscape–that you can never experience it twice. “The phenomenon, the moment, the light, the fact that it’s growing and always changing, I think that is deeply reassuring.”

in print

photos by mark dellas