MVVA

This landfill transformation is a low-budget effort to establish a welcoming landscape for Brooklynites. The MVVA team, limited by a small budget, excels in precision, focusing only on what truly matters in designing an escape from the dense city, a space that is more open to the sky and sea and not burdened by many programs, shapes and features. In Shirley Chisholm State Park, MVVA exposes the very core of landscape architecture as a discipline that is able to transform tight budgets into flourishing and kind landscape gestures, improving human and non-human lives. It shows how important it is to have a truly open space that is undetermined, less specified, a space that breaths and leaves one to simply be in the landscape.

MVVA was established in 1982 in New York City by Michael Van Valkenburgh and today comprises over 100 people in four offices. Their portfolio features an astounding number of dramatically diverse works of all scales, from complex waterfronts, flood infrastructure, parks, plazas, and campuses to tiny courtyards.

A subtle and particular MVVA’s touch is tangible throughout the portfolio. It is a quiet, yet recognizable presence, unconcerned with the passing trendy aesthetic regimes and introduced so diligently, it always positively complements landscape’s performative functions and ultimately deepens the experience. MVVA’s design approach reflects a respectful yet confident and playful conversation between expression, function, and the dynamics of natural processes.

Their projects feel immersive and comfortable, almost as if they aim to embrace the visitor through the outstanding use of topography and vegetation, as is visible in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Chelsea Cove, and others. Another distinguishing feature in MVVA’s work is the use of stone, often in the form of pavement or seating areas, but also in a bolder display, like the beautifully strange ice wall and playscape in Teardrop Park, stone work in Gathering Place in Tulsa or marble slabs in the Boston Children’s Museum Plaza. Such creative translation of everyday material into an uncanny landscape experience is vital for awakening the landscape into public perception.

MVVA’s Brooklyn Bridge Park is an expansive look at the twenty-five-year creation of the namesake landscape and its growth as an essential resource for the city around it. The narrative unfolds with more than 300 thoughtfully curated images: archival photos, sketches, artifacts of the planning process, documentation of the park’s construction, and sweeping shots that capture the park’s humanity, beauty, and iconic urban context. […]