MVV at the NY Times

The NY Times has posted a very short video of Michael Van Valkenburg. It feels like a telling sign of where landscape architecture is today. The highest-profile LAs are increasingly treated with a seriousness that parallels artists and scientists.

Lathrop Homes

Here is a story to watch for a while. It seems unlikely to get resolved without a few rounds of news coverage.

In Chicago, an old housing project is getting update. In an effort to turn the historic project into a riverfront destination, some buildings will be torn down and others will be renovated. The proposal is for a mixed income development that will feature kayak launches and lush parks.

The Chicago Tribune describes the proposed changes this way: "The exterior of the historic buildings would be restored to their Depression-era luster, while the buildings will be gutted and updated with modern amenities. New buildings would be designed to fit with the original architecture." It will include But the project is controversial. Perhaps because project reduces the number of affordable units from 925 to 525. But the Tribune says that there are currently only 140 low-income families living there.

The slideshow accompanying the Tribune story gives a sense for some community protests and concerns. Curbed reports that the landscape architecture is being designed by MVVA.

The projects were named after Julia Lathrop who led the United States Children's Bureau from 1912 to 1922.

Harvard University on MVV

Harvard Magazine has published a cover story on Michael Van Valkenburgh. Since we are hearing about ecology at his Brooklyn Bridge Park tomorrow, it would be a good time to read it.

Van Valkenburgh’s resistive independence is described well by Alan [sic] Shearer, M.L.A. ’94, Ph.D. ’03, a professor at the University of Texas and former MVVA employee: “Others at the GSD in the 1980s and ’90s turned to varieties of art—abstract minimalism, pop art, and land art—as a way to infuse the profession with new ideas. In contrast, Michael’s thinking—about gardens, plants, ephemeral states in natural processes, and precedents of landscape architecture—was trying to reclaim the profession’s core.”

ASLA Design Awards

The American Society of Landscape Architects has announced their list of 2009 design award winners and it is an impressive group. Included on the list are well-known designers and firms like RU Alum Andrea Cochran, MVV, SWA, MVV, Ken Smith, MVV, Mia Lehrer, WRT, Ken Smith, WRT, West 8, OLIN, and WRT and a few designers without such high profiles. And, several of the projects are ones that we already saw in our speakers series including:

• Stone Edge Farm, Sonoma, CA
• Teardrop Park
• The Dell at UVA
• Orange County Great Park

Rutgers' own Steven Handel is all over this thing, especially with his Research Award. Congrats!

Toyota Children's Learning Garden

Michael Van Valkenburgh just saw another project opened in New York City. The Toyota Children's Learning Garden is not a playground or arena for imagination so much as it is designed to help children learn about plants.

There doesn’t seem to be any place for children to climb, he was told. “It’s a garden for learning about plants, not a playground,” he said.

Don't worry, they still made sure that the structures were sturdy enough to handle New York's roughest. And MVV has done children's work before, so we'll trust he knows what they like. I know our boys loved his sliding board in Teardrop Park.

MVV on poetry

While it wasn't exactly central to his talk this evening, Michael Van Valkenburgh cited a poem by Wallace Stevens called Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I believe that the quote he referenced was:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

But you might want to read the whole poem.

And I've topped this post with the photo of Robert Rauschenberg's Migration, which was referenced in the talk too.

Margaret O. Cekada Memorial Lecture for 2007

Tuesday, April 10, 6:30 pm
Trayes Hall, Douglass Campus Center

Michael Van Valkenburgh
Recent Work

The Rutgers Department of Landscape Architecture
is pleased to announce that the 2007 Margaret O.
Cekada Memorial Lecture will be given by Michael
Van Valkenburgh, principal of Michael Van Valkenburgh
Associates and Charles Eliot Professor in Practice
of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design.

As one critic wrote, "To look at Van Valkenburg's
work is to see a landscape architect coming to
grips with a number of particularly contemporary
challenges. It is to be witness to an effort to
marry an essentially placeless modernist language
with more recent contextual concerns, whether
defined in terms of regionalism or local ecology."

In this talk Mr. Van Valkenburgh will share thoughts
on interpreting and engaging the built environment
in several of his recent projects including Alumnae
Valley on the Wellesley College Campus, which won an
American Society of Landscape Architects Award of
Excellence for 2006. Part of a seven-year reworking
of the campus, the design restores ecological function
to a once-contaminated landscape. The award jury
concluded: "The landscape architect backs up an
understated, sophisticated design with real science.
This project totally transforms the campus and sends
a very strong environmental message. Excellent
planning and execution--truly elegant."

Mr. Van Valkenburgh is a Fellow of the American
Society of Landscape Architects and of the American
Academy in Rome. He was awarded the 2003 National
Design Award in Environmental Design by the
Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt Museum and
has been the recipient of grants from numerous
organizations including the Graham Foundation and
the National Endowment for the Arts. He received
a BS in landscape architecture from Cornell University
and an MLA from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.

For questions, please contact the Department of
Landscape Architecture at 732-932-9317 or visit the
web site at landarch.rutgers.edu

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates website . . .
www.mvvainc.com

ASLA Award for Alumnae Valley website . . .
asla.org/awards/2006/06winners/309.html

Michael Van Valkenburgh

The Margeret Cekada Memorial Lecture for 2007 is going to be given Tuesday April 10th by Michael Van Valkenburgh. While waiting for the lecture you might visit the official website of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.