Valkenburgh's expansive imagination incorporates his knowledge of historical precedents—what he calls “revisiting ideas from the past”—and an ability to respond to the uniqueness of a site and of how it relates to a regional environment. Private gardens allow him personal control, and their scale makes possible a complete exploration of design. Sometimes he refines an experimental idea in the backyard of the gray clapboard house in Cambridge where his office is located next door to a former Laundromat that serves as the drafting room for Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
Growing up in an agricultural community, Van Valkenburgh says, provided him with the comfort and ease to let landscapes look legible and man-made. He recalls first fantasizing about the land as a boy when he brought the cows home from pasture in the Catskills to his family's modest dairy farm in Lexington, New York. Today, his work retains what he sees as “the deliberate simplicity of that remembered agrarian landscape,” as in the way a plantation of trees is angled into the hillside. For him, beauty and elegance are found in the straightforward solution rather than in the contrived picturesque. His search for a realistic approach, he believes, complements the abstract ideas he develops in his academic life at Harvard University, where design is taught as an art form.
At the beginning of his career, he was inspired by the book Design with Nature by Ian L. McHarg, the University of Pennsylvania landscape architect in the vanguard of the ecology movement who describes man-made landscapes as a picture of nature devised by both conscience and art. McHarg also offers the theory that we continually seek out or recreate “reassuring landscapes,” images made memorable through past associations. In his own work, Van Valkenburgh refers to memory and narrative. Seen in succession, his gardens are woven together by threads of repeated themes and images that recall in minimal forms archetypal models.
In these private landscapes, he combines horticulture—both as a strong element of design and as a transition to natural plantings at the fringes—with a seductive use of mineral elements—stone, water, and metal—that bring a cool, tangible veneer to the settings. Finally, he adds levels, dramatic changes of level that suggest passage and journeys through the gardens. As at the Potager du Roi, the king's kitchen garden at Versailles, steep staircases and slopes make abrupt shifts in the viewer's perspective and repeatedly alter the experience of space.
In the birch garden he designed in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, he drew on his agrarian sensibility to resolve the problem of a sloping terrain behind the house by creating a grade change that was even more pronounced. From a flat terrace above, defined by a brick-and-bluestone retaining wall, a plain flight of wooden stairs plunges into the lower-story woodland garden. The steps evoke for Van Valkenburgh the rickety ones leading down to docks on Martha's Vineyard, where he spends weekends and summers, and they function visually like a drawbridge lowered as a connector.
Planted along the steep slopes on either side is a thick grove of multistem gray and white birch trees whose trunks angle out into linear designs against lush underplantings of rhododendron, mountain laurel, ferns, vinca, common periwinkle, and European ginger. In this deliberate quotation from the garden Fletcher Steele designed in 1926 at Naumkeag in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Van Valkenburgh pays tribute to Steele's ideas about massing with subtle irregularity and about grading land in sculptural rather than natural forms.
While at Naumkeag the birch trees are seen in counterpoint to a series of curving stair rails of white pipes, in the Chestnut Hill garden the birch grove is bisected by a traditional Japanese temple path of diamond-shaped stepping stones set into bluestone gravel scattered with pine needles. Similar to the long granite stones that line Japanese paths, like one at Nanzen-ji in Kyoto, Van Valkenburgh has edged his path with black brick manganese, two dark lines that lead serenely not to a temple pavilion but to a stele-cum-fountain of polished green granite. Visible through a slit on the face of the stone column are overlapping plates of stainless steel that step up so that the flow of water cascades down over them as a fluid surface. At night, neon lights attached vertically in pairs to the brick piers at the top of the stairs cast an eerie glow akin to moonlight. This garden goes beyond pleasure by offering ideas and images that heighten one's experience of traversing what is otherwise a simple grove of trees.
As if designed as a continuation to the birch garden, the Pucker Garden, in nearby Brookline, evolved as a hillside embankment that creates an ascent in the shallow space of a suburban backyard. Calling on references to Roman antiquity, the garage at one side now appears like a ruin of an old tomb that has been excavated out of the adjacent hillside. Echoing the wooden steps, a staircase in high-tech galvanized steel checkerplate floats up like a shiny ziggurat across the myrtle-covered hillside. Curved like an amphitheater and planted with single-stem shadblow trees, the embankment becomes an ideal foil for displaying abstract sculptures on pedestals. The arrangement calls to mind the 1962 exhibition of David Smith's Voltri sculptures arrayed on the steps of the ancient coliseum in Spoleto, Italy.
Like the modernist architects of this century, Van Valkenburgh subscribes to the aesthetic principle that new materials and the latest technology dictate new forms. Without relinquishing classical garden features, he introduces hard-edged structures and industrial surfaces that at first appear more practical than ornamental, except that in the end their trimness and suitability make them a perfect blend with the flat green expanses that are to his gardens what sleek glass is to architecture.
At the entrance to the Pucker Garden, and on axis with the floating staircase across the lawn, a progression of Japanese-style stepping stones has been abstracted into rectangular stones of varying lengths embedded into exposed aggregate concrete. Running crosswise between these pavers are inlaid bands of irregularly set black pebbles that mimic Japanese stepping-stone patterns. Further on, the rendered surfaces of gray stucco for the retaining wall of the formed hillside and the garage exterior complement the galvanized steel post-and-wire-mesh trellis for Boston ivy that screens the back of the viewing path around the top of the hill. Guests usually complete the garden circuit on the flat terrace roof of the garage with its balustrade also of galvanized steel and wire mesh. From this overlook, the Japanese stone entrance patio below resembles a Mondrian painting in tones of gray.
In the lee of a 1950s modern house on a waterside estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, Van Valkenburgh continued the play of hard and soft surfaces in another sculpture garden he created to display important works by Barbara Hepworth. Concealed from the outer drive by a brick serpentine wall that provides slots for the carpark, the bluestone path inside the enclosure swings around a central island of Vinca minor in what the landscape architect calls a gestural curve. Except for an existing cutleaf maple he retained to preside over one corner, the sculptures are the main vertical features in the landscape. With the sound of low spouting fountain jets along the center of a rectangular goldfish pond, the scale recalls old cloistered gardens, fresh but simple, with dark beds of ivy around the perimeter.
Some of these same qualities are present in his Black Granite Garden in Los Angeles, only here the inspiration might be Italian cypress allées or Moorish rills. Even where the images refer to historical precedents, the forms are classically minimal. This is a linear garden, a 120-foot avenue of twenty-foot-high columnar Italian cypress trees set in beds of needle point ivy along a central spine of rosy gray manganese brick pavers that appears infinitely long, channeled as it is between the tall trees. At the edge of a small rill parallel to the path, another granite stele fountain has a monolithic quality—the water pours down the created “washboard” side, while the rough side, dry, faces the sun. A wall of thick-trunked ficus trees forms the boundary along the entire length of the garden. Length like this in a defined landscape is a liberating quality. The reason why avenues in general are so inviting is that they appear to go on forever.
One of Van Valkenburgh's wittiest designs is for a client in St. Louis who collects art from the commercial memorabilia of American highway strips—the real Pop Art. Among his treasures is a red metal Pegasus, the mythological flying steed that is the logo for the Mobil Company. As the myth goes, Pegasus with a single stroke of his hoof could bring forth the waters of Hippocrene, the sacred fountain
