Michael Van Valkenburgh

Michael Van Valkenburgh
Born	September 5, 1951
Occupation	Landscape Architect
Spouse(s)	Caroline Van Valkenburgh

Michael Robert Van Valkenburgh (born September 5, 1951) is an American landscape architect and educator. He has worked on a wide variety of projects in the United States, Canada, Korea, and France, including public parks, college campuses, sculpture gardens, city courtyards, corporate landscapes, private gardens, and urban master plans.

Michael Van Valkenburgh was born in September 5, 1951 and grew up in Lexington, New York, where his family owned a small dairy farm. Van Valkenburgh received a Bachelor of Science from the College of Agriculture at Cornell University in 1973, studied photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1974–75, and earned a Master of Landscape Architecture from the College of Fine Arts at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977. He worked at Carr, Lynch, Associates, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1979 until 1982, when he founded his own firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. In the early years of his practice, Van Valkenburgh specialized in seasonally dynamic hedge gardens and ice walls. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts which allowed him to experiment with ice as a material in landscape design. In 1988, Van Valkenburgh received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

Van Valkenburgh is the Charles Eliot Professor of Practice at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. His career at the GSD began in 1982; he served as program director from 1987–1989, and as Chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture from 1991-1996.

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