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. Life and career Early years and education Michael Van Valkenburgh was born on 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 to 1975, 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. Teaching career Van Valkenburgh is the Charles Eliot Professor of Practice, Emeritus at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. His career at the GSD began in 1982; he served as program director from 1987 to 1989, and as Chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture from 1991 to 1996. Design approach and inspiration Van Valkenburgh describes his work as an exploration of the living qualities of the landscape medium and an attempt to emancipate landscape architecture from a its traditionally subsidiary relationship to architecture. His designs are based on a sensitivity to the particular qualities of each project site and thus do not necessarily resemble one another with respect to form, details, or imagery. According to fellow landscape architect James Corner, Van Valkenburgh's work demonstrates "that the knowledge of a place derives more deeply through experience of material, time, and event, than through visuality alone, and that landscape experience is fuller and more profound when it accrues through inhabitation than through the immediacy of the image or the objectification of the new." As an architect, he has been influenced by his upbringing in