About Us
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) has over twenty years experience designing, building and restoring landscapes for a broad range of public, private, and corporate clients. Our landscapes demonstrate a consistently thorough approach that is responsive to each site's history, natural environment, and social context, while reflecting our ability to transform the aspirations of our clients into beautiful, inviting, and active spaces. Our approach to landscape architecture entails working closely with the site itself: the complex, existing, multi-layered place that has been shaped through an entire history of natural and cultural processes. MVVA embraces the dynamic nature of a living landscape whether designing for a small garden or a large urban park-- for MVVA, landscape architecture exists only in the passage of time.
The contemporary practice of landscape architecture is increasingly complex, with sites exhibiting a broad spectrum of challenges including: soil toxicity, the often divergent needs of multiple constituencies, isolation from surrounding urban contexts, coordination with infrastructure both old and new, and the emergence of a client base that is increasingly concerned with environmental and economic sustainability , to name a few. In grappling with these complexities, we resist surrendering design to the purely pragmatic and aim to strategically turn site limitations into creative opportunities.
MVVA has directed the design and construction of more than 350 landscapes for institutional, public, and private clients across the United States, Canada, France, and Korea. Throughout the firm's history, our work has been honored with numerous national design awards, and in 2003 Michael Van Valkenburgh was awarded the Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum's National Design Award for the collective body of his firm's work. The work of MVVA has been published widely, including the recent Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Allegheny Riverfront Park, published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.
The contemporary practice of landscape architecture is increasingly complex, with sites exhibiting a broad spectrum of challenges including: soil toxicity, the often divergent needs of multiple constituencies, isolation from surrounding urban contexts, coordination with infrastructure both old and new, and the emergence of a client base that is increasingly concerned with environmental and economic sustainability , to name a few. In grappling with these complexities, we resist surrendering design to the purely pragmatic and aim to strategically turn site limitations into creative opportunities.
MVVA has directed the design and construction of more than 350 landscapes for institutional, public, and private clients across the United States, Canada, France, and Korea. Throughout the firm's history, our work has been honored with numerous national design awards, and in 2003 Michael Van Valkenburgh was awarded the Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum's National Design Award for the collective body of his firm's work. The work of MVVA has been published widely, including the recent Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Allegheny Riverfront Park, published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.
