Strolling through Maggie Daley Park, stubble on his face and a yellow hard hat covering his graying red hair, Michael Van Valkenburgh paused before the contours of an undulating ice skating loop that will weave through a stand of evergreens.

"I see little Olympians in production here," said Van Valkenburgh, the park's chief designer, as his brown eyes settled on the concrete path for the "skating ribbon" in the emerging park. "That's gonna be, like, crazy popular."

You could say the same for Van Valkenburgh, 62, except he already is crazy popular, at least by the standards of his under-recognized profession. Revered for turning marginal pieces of urban land into magnets for people, the Brooklyn-based landscape architect is on a tear in Chicago.

Besides Maggie Daley Park, parts of which will open this fall, Van Valkenburgh and his firm have designed the 606 bike and pedestrian trail on the Northwest Side; a science quadrangle at the University of Chicago; and a just-announced park that will sit alongside a proposed 67-story Streeterville residential tower. The trail and the quad are expected to open next year. The park is sure to come up Monday at a public meeting on the skyscraper.

Van Valkenburgh, who got his master's in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a key player in the explosion of new parks that's transforming cities from New York to Seattle. It's been called America's second great wave of park building. The first came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, shaped by such giants of landscape design as Frederick Law Olmsted.

"No one will have ever experienced anything like (Maggie Daley Park) in Chicago," said Chicago landscape architect Peter Schaudt, Van Valkenburgh's former student at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. "He makes growth one of his design elements. He doesn't put trees in a static composition and just wait 20 years. He likes to use plant material as an organic growth material that changes constantly."

Named for the Chicago first lady who died at 68 in 2011 of breast cancer, the 27-acre, $60 million Maggie Daley Park replaces Daley Bicentennial Plaza, a banal 1979 park built atop a parking garage in Grant Park's northeast corner. In 2012, the old park was torn off like a bad toupee, a move necessitated by the need to redo a failing rubberized membrane that protected the garage from groundwater. In Daley Bi's place is Van Valkenburgh's design, which incorporates the Cancer Survivors Garden and Peanut Park to the east. The piano-shaped park also offers some pointed contrasts with Millennium Park to its west.

Instead of straight paths and noisy throngs, the new park will have meandering walkways and quiet places for picnicking nestled in gently sloping "lawn valleys." Yet it will also harbor state-of-the-art play areas, including the skating ribbon, jagged climbing structures that will rise as high as 40 feet and a 3-acre play garden brimming with wood towers and other equipment you won't find in your local park.

Can Van Valkenburgh resolve these potentially conflicting identities one pastoral, the other almost carnivalesque?

Schaudt thinks so. Maggie Daley Park is "what Grant Park needs. It gets relentless after a while," he said, referring to a Versailles-inspired, Beaux Arts landscape that, while impressive from the air, can be intimidating on the ground.

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Architect brings fresh spin to Maggie Daley Park

Justin Rausch - Gold Coast landscape architect
Landscaping Construction Design Service Australia. Justin and his team are dedicated to complete each individual project to that of the highest quality, with...

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Justin Rausch - Gold Coast landscape architect - Video

A sampling of the pairs collaborative work, photo courtesy of the Moyers.

By Genevieve Kotz

Susan Moyer, a landscape designer, and her architect husband, Douglas Moyer, dont always work together on projects, but when they do, its beneficial for both them and the client.

Its really great because we communicate so easily, Mrs. Moyer, who works from her Sag Harbor home, explained. Her husband keeps his office in a separate building on their property, making the two easily accessible for clients.

But the factor that makes them a great team is their ability to put the needs of a client before their own personal style, she said.

I may have my own personal preferences aesthetically, but I work for a client, Mrs. Moyer explained, Im able to switch in and out and give my client what they want as opposed to having such a strict style that only certain people would come to me.

I like all of the different possibilities just like there are different people out there, Mr. Moyer explained, noting that while he finds traditional houses that look more historic more interesting, he also has enjoyed working on more modern houses with a little bit of a twist to them. The two most recently worked on a 1710 farmhouse renovation together.

Mr. Moyer mainly does residential architecture, but he has also had experience working on institutional projects, like the recently completed Parrish Art Museum, where he served as project manager, and commercial ones, like his current project, Harbor Market, which will replace Espressos in Sag Harbor Village.

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Teaming Up for Designs Sake

By Ivan Nechepurenko

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: July 25, 2014 (Issue # 1821)

'Lazy Ziggurat' by Pole-Design Project Team. Photo: Arch.stoyanie.ru

When painter Nikolai Polissky and architect Vasily Schetinin moved to the village of Nikola-Lenivets, a four-hour drive south of Moscow, in 1989, they did not know that 15 years later, thousands would head to Russia's largest land art festival, Archstoyanie, which runs Friday to Sunday this week.

"Most of all, I was struck by the primordial, untouched natural beauty around Nikola-Lenivets," Polissky once told The St. Petersburg Times, "When you walk out onto the high bank of the [river] Ugra, it takes your breath away, and you understand what it was like 1,000, or 3,000 years ago."

The verdant landscape is now dotted with weird and wonderful wooden sculptures from past festivals and new ones set up for this year's event.

Visitors get to wander round the huge area checking out new objects. One of the most eagerly awaited is "Lazy Ziggurat" built from bark beetle infected timber, apparently a message to dying forests, and art performances such as Jean-Luc Brisson's degustation of clouds in the Cucumber-Compost area. The festival winds down with an eclectic music program, featuring Kira Lao, a Novgorod musician who has been compared to Beth Gibbons, which runs till early Sunday morning. This year there is also a kids camp at the festival.

Detailed instructions on how to get to the festival can be found at arch.stoyanie.ru. Tickets cost 1,000 rubles ($29).

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Landscape Art Fest Transforms Russian Countryside

Latrobe-Unity Parks and Recreation Commission received three proposals for the Lincoln Avenue Trail and chose landscape architect Rich Rauso of Trafford to begin working on plans for the 1.6-mile project.

He's worked with us over the years, said Executive Director Jeanne Ashley at the commission's meeting last week, citing other projects Rauso has completed, including work with Adelphoi USA, the city of Latrobe and local churches.

The trail, which will run along the former Ligonier Valley Rail Road path, is funded by a $250,000 grant from the Westmoreland County Community Conservation Partnership Program through the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Ashley said she has walked the route with a representative from DCNR and will do so with Rauso to begin planning work on the trail, which should take through the end of the year before construction begins in 2015.

The project, matched with $250,000 in funds, began when the Latrobe Foundation bought the right of way from Norfolk Southern Corp. in 2012. Two trailheads, stamped concrete crossings, erosion control and asphalt paving are all part of the plan for the path, as well as landscaping, benches and dog stations.

Ashley announced that a $5,000 grant was received from Coca-Cola for recycling bins.

The money will pay for 25 bins that will be installed throughout parks, she said.

It's time we tried to do our share of caring for our environment, she said.

A date has not been set for a kick-off celebration, but the event with local officials is in the works for Legion-Keener Park featuring free Coca-Cola from the sponsor, Ashley said.

The commission approved the hiring of two lifeguards for the remainder of the summer to replace those who quit.

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Landscape architect hired for Ligonier Valley Rail Road trail project

Peter Daniel - Architect Landscape Architect
A short film made in the early 1960 #39;s by John Paterson about how Peter Daniel set about creating the master plan for Livingston New Town in Central Scotland.

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Peter Daniel - Architect & Landscape Architect - Video

First Flight
First Flight is the name given to the landscaped entrance along George Bolt Memorial Drive, leading to the Airport from the north. Designed by James Lord, a New Zealand landscape architect...

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First Flight - Video

Alex Skolnick, Kiran Ahluwalia Nitin Mitta rehearsing - Planetary Coalition
Planetary Coalition is a world music project started in New York City by jazz, metal, any-style guitarist and writer Alex Skolnick and his collaborator architect landscape architect Maddy...

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Alex Skolnick, Kiran Ahluwalia & Nitin Mitta rehearsing - Planetary Coalition - Video

Where the River Shannon Flows was a best-seller in 1940. Illustration: Michael Viney

The new logo on our road signs had me puzzled for days. Wavy white lines on blue what was that about? Narrow, wiggly, bumpy roads? Fair enough. Good surfing? Not that way, into the mountains. Eventually it dawned were now part of the Wild Atlantic Way.

That must be why theyve mended all the potholes and why the grassy-spined boreen down to the strand, clearly just wide enough for one careful driver, has a big, new speed limit of 50km/h.

So now, summoned for a check-up at our distant centre of excellence, it is wisest to leave before breakfast to beat the camper vans into Doolough Pass and, come August, best to stock up with a months supply of everything and close the gate behind us, grateful for the summer mufflement of trees.

It was the Romantics, said Bertrand Russell (in his History of Western Philosophy) who shaped the wild taste in scenery a revolt of passion and individualism against a world of stultifying peace and quiet. Up to Rousseau, he argued, the admired rural landscape was a scene of fertility, with rich pastures and lowing kine. But then dramatic and untamed scenery took over the poets and novelists and almost everybody nowadays this from Russell in 1945 prefers Niagara and the Grand Canyon to lush meadows and waving corn.

Since Russell, a warming world has seen great changes. Spectacular chasms and rushing torrents are no longer the passionate metaphors of literature, but physical threats of things to come. Meanwhile, the Wild Atlantic Way offers soothing views of an infinite horizon, while driving very slowly and never checking the mirror.

But what of the islands interior, still mostly under human command? Just published, and largely ignored by the media is the Governments Draft National Landscape Strategy. It comes a decade after signing the European Landscape Convention and 20 years of native agitation and advice, most cogently from from the Heritage Council and, on the sidelines, from Terry ORegan, the crusading landscape architect from Cork.

A speaker at one of his landscape conferences in the 1990s offered a tempting but cynical thesis: Basically, landscape planning means that those of good taste, or hopefully of good taste, tell those of bad taste or none what they may or may not do. But the European convention was heavy on subsidiarity taking decisions at the most local level possible. Along with pulling together all the government and sectoral interests in the landscape, much of the Irish effort has gone into cultivating trust among stakeholders defending their local views, trees and hedges.

The passing years have brought good successes in local management of landscape, land use and heritage, as in the Wicklow uplands, the Burren, Bere Island, the Great Western Greenway and many locally-negotiated walking trails. But rows over wind farms and pylons continue to warrant a fully developed landscape policy.

We seem little nearer to deciding how landscape should be described at least in terms that bureaucracy feels it can use. It is 14 years since local authorities were charged with preparing landscape character assessments factual appraisals, to eschew any notions of beauty or other aesthetic ranking. Many counties, indeed, did their best (Co Meaths is one worth reading online) but developing a national landscape character assessment is still a heartfelt wish listed in the strategy document.

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Another Life: Notions of landscape liable to produce divergent opinions

July 17, 2014 -

The Manzanita Speaker Series will present renowned landscape architect Mia Lehrer who will share her commitment and vision to achieving a healthier, more holistic future through the design of symbiotic cities.

(ML+A), Lehrer's international landscape architecture and urban design firm, is located in Los Angeles, CA. It is known for its design and development of a wide spectrum of ambitious public and private projects including; the LosAngeles River Revitalization Master Plan and creating an ecological laboratory in the heart of Los Angeles with the Natural History Museums Nature Gardens.

Manzanita Institute, an initiative of Manzanita School (www.ManzanitaSchool.org), begins as a parent involvement, education and participation portal. The institute convenes thought leaders to advance dialogues around learning, youth engagement, nature connection, and healthy human development. It is a space where global thinkers, educators, parents and students gather to inspire and teach one another.

For all inquiries please contact Kim@ManzanitaSchool.org.

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Manzanita Speaker Series: Designing with Nature, July 25