Alumnae Valley
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

When Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. surveyed Wellesley College in 1902, he encountered a landscape of glacial landforms, valley meadows, and native communities—site elements he emphatically encouraged the college to preserve in the development of the campus.  However, in the ensuing decades the area now known as Alumnae Valley instead became the site for the college’s physical plant, industrialized natural gas pumping, and ultimately, a 175-car parking lot over a toxic brownfield.  MVVA’s design of The Alumnae Valley Landscape Restoration confronts a history of contamination on this 13.5 acre site and results in a new landscape center for the campus that addresses large-scale issues of the relationship between the built environment and the ecology of the site.

The restored Alumnae Valley again becomes part of the natural valley hydrological system that structures the form of the Wellesley campus. Not merely a restoration, the reconceptualization of the site included an understanding of its historical function: from glacial valley to industrial dumping ground to parking lot to a valley restored yet informed by its previous incarnations. Its use of topography as both a means of design solution and experiential enhancement underscores a landscape that is at once willfully artificial and unabashedly picturesque.

Tahari Courtyards
Millburn, New Jersey

The Tahari Office and Warehouse Complex is a renovated storage facility in suburban New Jersey consisting of a 20,000 square foot office facility and a 200,000 square foot warehouse annex. Two new courtyard spaces were created by cutting into the continuous roof structure of the office facility, removing the steel supports and saw-cutting the concrete slab below.  The courtyard design is a modern adaptation of an ancient form, the Roman impluvium. The courtyards invite light and weather from the greater landscape into the interior. The edges of the gardens are left largely transparent so that people can experience the natural elements from deep within the office space.  As one stands within the building, looking through the multiple layers of interior and exterior space, the play of light on the glass walls recombines the spatial elements, creating an artful blurring of building and garden.

Although the two courtyard spaces are separate, they are conceived as one continuous landscape.  Our design visually connects these spaces through circulation, sight lines, and planting strategy. A miniature forest of river birch is distributed throughout the courtyards and helps to create the synergy between the gardens.  Bamboo groves, the only evergreen element, are reserved for the opposing ends of the courtyards and help lend a sense of unity.  The garden, with its robust textures, inserts a natural irregularity into an otherwise austere modern interior. The courtyards use two materials innovatively: black locust for the walkway and woodsy mnium moss for the groundcover.

Brooklyn Bridge Park
Brooklyn, New York

In 2003, after having been one of many collaborators on a preliminary master plan for the site, MVVA, and our team of more than a dozen subconsultants, including engineers, artists, environmental experts, architects, and economic advisors, was selected to design Brooklyn Bridge Park.  In addition to developing the programming of the park and its overall spatial design and form, MVVA was hired to oversee strategies for economic and environmental sustainability.  Upon completion in 2011, the post-industrial 85-acre park will stretch along 1.3 miles of Brooklyn waterfront from Manhattan Bridge in the north to Atlantic Avenue in the south.

Extensive community involvement during the planning stages of the park guided decision making throughout the design.  Given the universally high expectations that surround the project, a major design challenge has been to balance competing uses; the MVVA design seeks to provide maximum range within an intelligible and cohesive park experience.  Brooklyn Bridge Park will serve as both neighborhood gathering spot and regional attraction, offering recreational opportunities for day to day users, including playgrounds, walking paths, and dog runs, as well as specialized activities, such as soccer, kayaking, basketball, and ice-skating, that will draw users from far beyond Brooklyn.  Within its 85 acres, the park will also introduce a new landscape featuring rolling hills, tidal pools, promenades, salt water marshes, bird habitat, sand dunes, beaches, groves of trees, and open lawns.  The historic character of Brooklyn’s waterfront will contribute significantly to the unique experience of the park.  The site’s strongest features, including the bridge profiles, the skyline of Manhattan, and the activities of the harbor, will provide a larger urban landscape setting for the park that is unmatched even by the likes of Central Park.

Lower Don Lands
Toronto, ON, Canada

The MVVA team’s proposal to transform the Lower Don Lands into a sustainable urban community employs an integrated landscape-based methodology of the city building that has the potential to become a model for cities around the world.  Our winning proposal unites the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) goals of introducing urban development, native ecologies, and public infrastructure to this former industrial site in order to transform it into a vibrant new community for Toronto.  The bold new park at the center of our scheme consolidates the program of naturalized river mouth, floodway, recreational park, and neighborhood icon into a single and complex central landscape that supports and becomes the generator of new urban life.

Our vision for the Lower Don Lands is that of an urban estuary, a place of exchange, where urban and natural systems intermingle in a balanced yet dynamic relationship to create a unique environment.  Instead of fixing traditional boundaries between land and water, we propose to form a critical "ecotone," an area of great richness and complex mixing in the spatial, ecological, social, and economic sense.

50 Avenue Montaigne Courtyard, MVVA
Paris, France

The site is an open-air courtyard constructed on the rooftop of a parking garage in a corporate office complex in central Paris. Entry is through the ground level of the adjacent building. The goal of the design was to create a garden for the use and enjoyment of the building employees and as a segue between the nineteenth-century storefront at the 50 Avenue side and the more contemporary office tower at the rear of the site.

The courtyard garden at the center of the building is a spare composition of stainless steel water columns and long basins that alternate with rows of fastigiate hornbeam trees and horizontally espaliered linden trees. This project required extensive site adaptations to make a landscape on a rooftop including the creation of low weight soil mixtures, subsurface drainage, and a complex irrigation system.

While this garden was designed to be of visual interest when viewed from the offices above, it is primarily through experience and movement in and around the courtyard that the landscape is revealed. The building's interior circulation corridor which is walled in glass serves as a transparent threshold to the garden space. The design principles of layering, parallel composition, and axial ordering were serially applied to the landscape materials of stone, metal, water, and plants to create a modern garden that draws the viewer into and through its spaces. The three-dimensional spatial qualities of the landscape are rendered in a spare manner to create both an ambiguous sense of physical scale and an experiential intimacy, which recalls the tradition of garden making in France.

Allegheny Riverfront Park
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The proposed park is a linear band of open space along the Allegheny River within the downtown cultural district of Pittsburgh. The design relocates pre-existing roadways and creates an open promenade space at the edge of the river. This walk blends fragments of Pittsburgh's industrial heritage with vegetation associated with local riparian greenways.

In addition to the riverfront walk, the park includes a series of upper-level open spaces, separated from the river by a four-lane highway and a thirty-foot retaining wall. The upper park 'plazas' use continuous benches, rows of broad spreading deciduous shade trees, and earth forms to create new perspectives on the Allegheny River while diminishing the presence of the surrounding roadways.

On the lower level promenade visitors pass beneath three magnificent steel suspension bridges, explore new boulder fields planted with River Birch and Red Maple, and experience a pair of steel and concrete ramps, ascending gradually from the river park to the bridge decks and the upper park. The design is meant to reflect the structural and material boldness of the site as well as the fragile and living riparian edge. The design was completed in 1998 in collaboration with artist Ann Hamilton.

This project received a Progressive Architecture Awards Citation in 1997.

Master Plan for the Landscape of Harvard Yard
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Harvard Yard is the oldest part of the Harvard University campus containing more than three centuries of architecture and built landscapes. The buildings and landscapes of the Yard form an inseparable composition: the architecture delimits the spaces and the landscape defines the ground surfaces, characterizes internal enclosures, and marks the sky above.

Over the past several decades, the physical structure of the Yard has begun to deteriorate. Many of the American Elms that once gracefully defined the overhead tree canopy have been fatalities of Dutch Elm disease. Several pedestrian walks no longer meet the traffic demands placed on them and increased use of the lawn areas has resulted in severe soil compaction. The landscape architects were asked to produce a master plan that would be used to direct the evolution of Harvard Yard over the next decade.

The master plan attempts to provide a framework for understanding this built landscape and directing its physical change through a synthetic critique of the relationships of space, materials, and culture while respecting the frugal elegance that has guided its evolution over time. The plan is an interpretation of the existing landscape of Harvard Yard in relation to the history of the site, to the University's current needs, and to anticipated changes. It exercises a vision of the landscape that attempts to synthesize architecture and landscape architecture.

The primary areas of investigation included the replanting of the canopy of the Yard, a revision of circulation systems based on current demands and anticipated building use changes, and an editing of many inappropriate recent projects, including the removal of many of the plantings at the bases of buildings which obscure the historic simplicity of buildings meeting the ground plane.

The master plan recognized that an integrated policy for management and implementation needed to evolve through concensus to engage all of the planners and implementors who have jurisdiction over the landscape. The plan is organized as an accessible workbook of planning ideas, design projects, and maintenance recommendations.

This project received a 1994 Honor Award for excellence in historic preservation from the National Trust and a 1993 Merit Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Ice Walls Radcliffe Yard
Cambridge, Massachusetts (1988)

Following a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study climatic effects on ice formation, the Harvard/Radcliffe Office for the Arts commissioned a temporary installation of ice walls in Radcliffe Yard. The design consisted of three arcing walls, each measuring fifty feet long and seven feet high and constructed of a fine galvanized metal mesh with a thin irrigation pipe running along the top. Water emitted from the irrigation system froze and created walls of ice.

This project included two stages: experimental studies during 1987 and the building of the landscape in 1988. In the winter of 1987, a laboratory was set up to examine critical technical issues: water point-sources, the impact of the rate of water flow on ice formation, the implications of varied surface articulation, and the influences of temperature on the freezing and thawing of ice.

Between February 5 and February 20, 1988, a landscape composed of three flattened curved walls were iced on the Harvard campus. Each wall was seven feet tall and approximately 45 feet long. The piece was sited on the Cabot House Quadrangle at Harvard University near the mail room to encourage students to walk in and around the ice walls. The Quadrangle is approximately 150 feet wide and 450 long, and the ice walls were located on the western most side of the Quadrangle, near a frequently used walk.

The walls were framed with two inch diameter galvanized steel pipe. Grids of welded wire mesh were attached to both sides of the pipe frames and provided the surfaces for ice accretion. The water was emitted as a mist from plastic pipes strapped to the top rail. Six times in the fifteen-day period the walls were iced. The ice formations were varied, depending on temperature and wind speed and direction.

Mill Race Park
Columbus, Indiana

Mill Race Park occupies 85 acres at the western edge of downtown Columbus at the confluence of the East Fork of the White River, the Driftwood River, and the Flatrock River. At the start of our work, the park was a 66-acre naturally wooded area developed over the last 25 years by community volunteers. An additional nineteen acres of land added to the parcel had been used previously for industrial purposes. The park is within a flood plain and required construction permitting to be obtained from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates provided master planning and complete design services for the park, including analyzing and reconfiguring the spatial structure and range of anticipated park uses; revising park circulation paths to reduce conflicts between vehicular and pedestrian needs; analysis of cost projections; design of a 500-seat performance amphitheater also capable of accommodating 5,000; a new round lake; a boat house for paddle boat rentals; three picnic shelters; a large playground; a basketball court; a fishing pier; a park overlook and park tower; new horseshoe pits; two new restrooms; new parking lots for 600 cars; connection of the existing People Trail with a new one-half mile River Walk; new park lighting; and a wetland interpretive area.

The park buildings were programmed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and sited in collaboration with the architect Stanley Saitowitz.

From its inception the design of Mill Race Park developed within an open and inclusive framework that involved public leaders, interested citizens, and local government. The "Saturday in the Park" event held at Mill Race in the first weeks of schematic design yielded an open discussion among citizens, the city government, and the design team about the role the park could play in the future life of the city. The gathering held at the site allowed an exchange of ideas about possible program elements for the new park. A survey planned in collaboration with Sue Weidemann, an environmental psychologist, was distributed to better determine anticipated park use and to reveal the attitude of the people of Columbus toward the environment, public open space, and their aspirations for this place.

Our design has strived to reinvigorate the American park as the centerpiece of public life and as a symbol of the spirit of Columbus. Our approach has been to express the history and values of the people of Columbus and to engage the natural systems of the landscape. It is through this duality of culture and environment that the urban park can bond people and place.

The industrial history of Columbus and its geographic relationship to the river are actively engaged in the design solution through the inclusion of fragments of industry and visible infrastructure, including the old footing of a highway bridge that once spanned the river and foundations of earlier mill buildings. These elements are ruins of American industrialism and speak to our need to connect people with the history of place.

The Round Lake provides a spiritual center for the park and expresses the built form of the city, through the pure geometry of the circle juxtaposed with the sinuous forms of the surrounding rivers. This new lake is connected to an existing adjacent lake by narrow stainless steel pipes that breech the low dam built between the two bodies of water. This simple design detail, and similar details throughout the park, reveal the thin artificial edge that separates the built from the unbuilt and the undeniable continuity of natural forces.

The expression of history and culture in this landscape is balanced with an equivalent emphasis on the revelation and celebration of the natural systems of the site. The design stresses the experiential quality of the river edges. Some of the low thickets of plants along the meandering riverbank were cleared away and the overhead canopy of the trees raised to reveal views. A new walk was built through this reclaimed river edge which connects with an existing network of park trails that lead to downtown Columbus. The park roadway was relocated closer to the river edge to allow motorists to look out over the water. Editing the vegetation and inserting the new path revealed the underlying ecology of the flood plain and established a connection of the park to its context.

University of Iowa, Master Planning and Design
Iowa City, Iowa

This site consists of most of the University of Iowa campus including the Arts Campus, the Main Library landscape, and the Iowa River Corridor. The program includes the creation of a master plan for the Arts Complex along the Iowa River, a master plan for the Iowa River Corridor, and the design of the central open space for the Arts Campus.

These three interrelated projects have been occurring simultaneously for the University of Iowa. The University of Iowa Arts Campus Master Plan proposes a series of new linear landscape corridors to link Riverside Drive with the Iowa River. The master plan also proposes to clarify pedestrian and vehicular paths running north-south between the buildings all within a severely constrained site where over 900 cars are parked on grade.

The Iowa River Garden, created with a wetland meadow and an embracing grove of River Birch, will serve as the new spiritual center for this part of the campus and provide a sense of orientation. A schematic design has been completed for this project-scale component of the Arts Campus Master Plan. The design seeks to re-route underground runoff pipes so that this water is purified and filtered in a new river garden lagoon before it flows into the Iowa River.

The Arts Campus Master Plan recommends a reconfigured edge of the Iowa River and has informed a separate study, the Iowa River Corridor Landscape Master Plan. The purpose of this study is to address a 1.2-mile span of the Iowa River and its attendant landscape as one dynamic, interactive, and ecological system. This master plan studies the biological and engineering aspects of the river and proposes a new landscape corridor that is accessible, sustainable, and resonant with the open space organization of the university. The Iowa River Corridor project was a collaboration with the riparian restoration firm of Inter-Fluve, Inc.