At age 18, Michael Van Valkenburgh enrolled at SUNY Oneonta to study history. Fast forward to today where he’s the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He has also designed major projects ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge Park to the master plan of Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury.
Along the way, something changed.
In his freshman year of college, Mr. Van Valkenburgh’s ecology professor said to him upon his retirement, “If I had my life to live again, I would be a landscape architect.”
“That was the first time I ever heard those two words put together,” said Mr. Van Valkenburgh in a recent interview with the Gazette. “And I started digging around and seeing what that was, and it was like I was sailing a boat and I turned the boat 15 degrees. I discovered my own internal affinity with the idea of landscape as a creative medium.”
After realizing his interest in the field, Mr. Van Valkenburgh transferred to Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture. He went on to earn a master’s degree, and in 1982 started his own firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc.
During the year, he splits his time between his Brooklyn and Cambridge offices. For the past 24 years he has spent his summers at his Chilmark residence. Though the Island offers him a break from his regular work, he remains professionally active here. On the Vineyard, he works on private gardens and is currently designing a new garden at Polly Hill Arboretum.
On Thursday, July 31, he will give a lecture at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center as part of its Summer Institute Speaker Series.
His lecture, titled The Role of Parks in an Urbanizing World, will focus on how his parks work “urbanistically” and how green space fits into urban life and the public realm in general.
Joseph Bower, chairman of the Summer Institute, asked Mr. Van Valkenbugh to speak about this topic after reading an article about his urban landscape work in Harvard Magazine. Mr. Bower shares a Harvard connection with Mr. Van Valkenburgh. He is a professor at the business school.
When Mr. Bower and the Summer Institute committee were discussing who to invite to the speaker series to ensure a diverse lineup, Mr. Bower thought of Mr. Van Valkenburgh. He knew Mr. Van Valkenburgh’s message would resonate with the Island community.
“Almost everybody you meet on the Vineyard is green and environmentally concerned,” said Mr. Bower. “But almost no one is aware that we’re going to be building something like 10 or 20 cities of a million people for the next 20 to 25 years if we’re going to house the people who are going to be living in the cities. Otherwise, we’re going to get more megacities like Shanghai or Mexico City. So the whole question of how to build livable urban environments is important.”
Mr. Van Valkenburgh noted that in the last 20 years, since an increasing amount of people have chosen to live in cities instead of suburbs, the “density of cities,” has made park spaces essential.
“I don’t like to say parks are an escape from the city, because somehow that makes the idea of the park and the work that it has to do somehow seem separate from the idea of the city,” Mr. Van Valkenburgh said. “I like to think of it as an escape in the city.”
The idea of parks as escapes within cities has been one of Mr. Van Valkenburgh’s favorite themes to explore in his work.
“An escape is such an essential aspect of being human,” he said. “The whole nature of our minds and our imaginations are about the imaginary or psychological relocation of ourselves or repositioning ourselves from one kind of a circumstance to another.”
The challenge has been how to design parks that appeal to all kinds of people — young, old, active and inactive.
“It’s something that I love talking about,” he said. “I love the world and imagining landscape. It’s very, very satisfying to me.”
Mr. Van Valkenburgh will be the fourth of six lecturers to speak at the Hebrew Center this summer. The Summer Institute was founded 15 years ago to “bring to the Island truly remarkably interesting and important figures to talk about issues that are either very timely or very important,” said Mr. Bower. “One of the goals was to provide very high quality intellectual stimulation as opposed to beach and golf and tennis,” he added.
The Summer Institute is divided into two programs — a Film Series at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center and the Speaker Series at the Hebrew Center. Films are screened every Sunday at 7:30 p.m. and lectures occur every Thursday at 7:30 p.m. until mid-August.
Though the Hebrew Center does not pay speakers to come to the Island, the Summer Institute has been able to attract renowned professionals across many disciplines, including politician David Gergen (former advisor to Presidents Ford, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton) and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson.
This summer, Rudolph Tanzi has given a lecture on Alzheimer’s, Jonathan Zittrain spoke about cybersecurity, and Ezra Vogel talked about his scholarship on modern China. In the coming weeks, Arnole Eisen will speak about American Judiasm in the App Generation and Charles Ogletree will give a lecture about President Obama.
Although the lectures are always well attended, Mr. Bower hopes to see new faces in attendance this summer.
“The Summer Institute would really like to broaden its audience,” he said. “The more it can be regarded as an asset of the whole Vineyard in the summer, the better.”
For more information about lecturers and films, visit mvsummerinstitute.com.
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