Join a member of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum horticulture staff on Friday, April 10 for a 30-minute presentation about the role of plants at the Museum, past and present. Then, step into the enchanting world of plants at the Gardner Museum for an hour-long guided experience through the galleries. Experience the magic of the verdant Courtyard, view the Monks Garden designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and discuss botanical imagery embedded throughout Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection.
This is a ticketed event, and space is limited. Click HERE to see pricing and availability, and to purchase tickets. The program will be repeated Monday, May 4 and Wednesday, June 10.
Join a member of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum horticulture staff on either November 18 or December 18 for a 30-minute presentation about the role of plants at the Museum, past and present. Then, step into the enchanting world of plants at the Gardner Museum for an hour-long guided experience through the galleries. Experience the magic of the verdant Courtyard, view the Monks Garden designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (below), and discuss botanical imagery embedded throughout Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection.
This is a ticketed event, and space is limited. Click HERE to see pricing and availability, and to purchase tickets.
On October 12 at 3 pm, enjoy a talk at The Polly Hill Arboretum Far Barn, 795 State Road in West Tisbury. Brooklyn Bridge Park, 1.3 miles long and more than 20 years in the making, has transformed an abandoned waterfront into a public landscape visited by 5 million people a year. Combining the perspectives of designer and horticulturalist, Michael Van Valkenburgh and Rashid Poulson will discuss the planning, realization, and stewardship of the landscape with a special focus on planting design and ecology, emphasizing the continued collaboration between the firm and park operations team. The conversation marks the arrival Brooklyn Bridge Park, a visual biography of the landscape by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates released by the Monacelli Press in early 2024. $20 ($10 for PHA members). Please pre-register at https://www.pollyhillarboretum.org/event/creating-the-brooklyn-bridge-park/?instance_id=2439
Anita Berrizbeitia is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She served as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture between 2015-2022 and as Program Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs between 2012-2015. Her research explores nineteenth and twentieth-century public realm landscapes, with interests in material culture, urban political ecology, and the productive functions of landscapes in processes of urbanization and climate adaptation. Her research on Latin American cities and landscapes focuses, in addition, on the role of large-scale infrastructural projects on territorial organization, climate adaptation, and on the interface between landscape and emerging urbanization.
A licensed landscape architect, she has worked on a broad range of projects and competitions, including urban design, campus planning, public parks, and residential gardens. She is a consultant for national and international landscape architectural firms and has served on juries of multiple design competitions in the US and abroad, including Chair of the Jury of the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, and design competitions in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, and the Middle East. At Harvard, she serves on the university’s Design Review Board, the Harvard University Committee on the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA). Before joining the GSD in 2009 she was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the GSD she has taught core Landscape Architecture studios and core Urban Design studios. Her option studios have focused on urban and territorial scale infrastructures, on emergent urbanization, and climate adaptation. She has also taught design theory in both the core and elective curricula.
Berrizbeitia is editor of Urban Landscape—Critical Concepts in Built Environment Series; editor of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes(Yale University Press), which received an ASLA Honor Award; author of Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956–1961 (Penn Press), awarded the inaugural J.B. Jackson Book Prize in 2007 from the Foundation for Landscape Studies; and co-author with Linda Pollak of Inside/Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape, which won an ASLA Merit Award. Her essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA); Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes; Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts(National Gallery of Art); Cultural History of Gardens (Berg Publishers); Sao Paolo: A Graphic Biography(University of Texas Press), Cerros Islas Santiago (Fundación Cerros Islas); Recovering Landscape(Princeton Architectural Press);CASE: Downsview Park Toronto(Prestel); Large Parks(Princeton Architectural Press); and Retorno al Paisaje (Evren) among others. With Diane Davis, she co-edited Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics (2021).
Berrizbeitia received a BA from Wellesley College in Studio Art and an MLA from the GSD. She was awarded the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2006.
This lecture explores how developments in the earth sciences—specifically geology, evolutionism, and biogeography—ushered in advances in design methodologies for large public–realm landscapes in late nineteenth-century Boston.
In her earlier work on Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System of 1892, she argued that geology had provided a framework for re-envisioning what had become a fragmented territory as a unified whole. Eliot proposed the region’s formative processes and the thick and unseen strata underlying the visible and varied topography in and around Boston as the foundation for a new political geography for a rapidly expanding city. For the Blue Hills, the largest of the reservations of the park system, Eliot turns his attention to the surface, proposed as a mantle of vegetation that drapes over the hills’ granitic foundation. Eliot introduces methods of biogeography to fieldwork, of forestry and conservation, and of what today we call restoration ecology. However, Eliot also prompts us to reconsider the role of the wild and wilderness, and of aesthetics in relationship to a growing public. Rather than being the product of a singular or unified framework, his proposal shows us the intertwining of multiple design methods and ways of knowing that join notions of the “wild” and of the “urban.”
Harvard Graduate School of Design is proud to host this October 10 Frederick Law Olmsted free lecture at Gund Hall’s Piper Auditorium beginning at 6:30 pm. For complete details visit www.gsd.harvard.edu
The Esplanade Association announces a $20 million gift commitment made to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that will fund the establishment of Charlesbank Landing, a two-acre riverfront park enhancement on the historic Charles River Esplanade in Boston.
As featured by The Boston Globe, this “gift would fund $12 million in improvements, including a new year-round visitors center, in a two-acre area along Storrow Drive where the Lee Pool once stood until the Department of Conservation and Recreation leveled the long-neglected complex nearly two years ago. The association plans to raise another $2 million for an endowment, and at least $6 million to cover operations and maintenancefor the site over the next three decades.”
This gift will be funded by donations from members and supporters of the Esplanade Association and represents one of the largest private gifts to the Commonwealth’s state parks system in history.
The Esplanade needs YOUR HELP to transform this two-acre area of the Esplanade. Join your fellow community members in voicing your support for Charlesbank Landing today!
Bidding Now Open for The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s (TCLF) Good Books, Good Friends Silent Auction. The collection includes more than 70 monographs and books by landscape architects, architects, photographers, and allied practitioners with inscriptions, autographs, sketches, watercolors, collages and other additions that make them unique collectors’ items. Participants include Marion Brenner, Jeanne Gang, Walter Hood, Laurie Olin, Kate Orff, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Peter Walker, and dozens of others. There are also rare works by Lawrence Halprin, Elizabeth deForest, Thomas Church, A.E. Bye, James Rose, and more. Bid Now through March 15, 2021. Proceeds benefit TCLF’s education and advocacy initiatives.
Michael Van Valkenburgh is the founder of the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, with offices in Brooklyn, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm works at all scales, from large urban green spaces like Brooklyn Bridge Park to intimate gardens like the Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Other recent projects include Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago (rendering below), A Gathering Place for Tulsa, and master planning and design for a new neighborhood at the mouth of Toronto’s Lower Don River.
Michael earned a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and a Master of Fine Arts in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Currently the Charles Eliot Professor Emeritus in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Michael is a registered landscape architect in more than 25 states. On Thursday, October 25 at 6:30 pm in the Piper Auditorium at Gund Hall at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Michael will deliver the Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture, free and open to the public. For more information visit http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/michael-van-valkenburgh/
The Gardner Museum recently commissioned Michael Van Valkenburgh to design a new four-season garden on the site of what Isabella Gardner called her “Monk’s Garden.†The redesigned Monk’s Garden, sited to the east of the historic palace, opened in September 2013 as part of the Museum’s expanded campus. CORRESPONDENCE features design process and construction drawings of the new garden, as well as communications between the design team and contractors responsible for its construction. The exhibition centers on a pair of letters between Norma Jean Calderwood Director Anne Hawley and Van Valkenburgh describing their aspirations for the new garden at the beginning of the design process. The exhibition also presents photographs that illustrate how greatly the garden has changed over the years.
Van Valkenburgh’s design of the Monk’s Garden interprets the Museum’s meandering gallery layout, and the rich colors and textures of its idiosyncratic collection, in a contemporary landscape context. While the garden is accessible (weather permitting) from both the original Museum building and Renzo Piano’s new addition, it is not the primary connection between them, freeing it to focus instead on cultivating a sense of place. The garden is given its own interior, with the aim of provoking extended quiet contemplation rather than hurried passage.
The original high brick wall of Fenway Court surrounds the garden, and the design aims to soften this enclosure through the creation of a small-scale, dreamlike woodland. Composed of approximately 60 trees including stewartia, paper bark maple, and gray birch, the groves establish a detail-rich palette of colors and textures suitable for intimate appreciation. Winding paths, paved in a striking combination of black brick and reflective mica schist, meander through the trees. Rather than intersecting, the paths playfully meet and diverge, while also gently widening in places to create nooks for garden chairs. For more information visit www.gardnermuseum.org.
Please join Michael Van Valkenburgh and his associate Jason Siebenmorgen for a presentation on the design process and vision for the Polly Hill Arboretum’s future West Woodland Garden and Forest Ecology Trail, on Thursday, August 21 beginning at 5:30 pm. A wine and cheese reception begins the presentation. A free Member only event. (for membership information call 508-693-9426).
Join Rebecca McMackin, Director of Horticulture for Brooklyn Bridge Park, at the Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury on Wednesday, September 18 at 7:30 to learn about a park purposely created with ecology in mind. This 85-acre post-industrial waterfront site stretches 1.3 miles along Brooklyn’s East River edge, built in-part on old commercial piers. The park’s award winning piers include top notch recreation, from opera to outdoor films, expansive organic lawns, and fantastic food, all of it beautifully designed. But the piers also contain native woodlands, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, and numerous meadows. These areas closely mimic native ecosystems and are managed with an emphasis on wildlife habitat.
McMackin will discuss the many ecological strategies employed by the park’s designers, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, as well as the management techniques currently in use to cultivate biodiverse parkland. Pragmatic strategies for encouraging ecologically beneficial landscapes will be enumerated. $10/$5 for PHA members.
