With offices in Brooklyn, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a staff of 65, MVVA approaches design and planning as a creative collective.
MVVA is a landscape architecture firm that creates environmentally sustainable and experientially rich places across a wide range of landscape scales, from city to campus to garden. Founded in 1982, MVVA's earliest projects, primarily gardens, plazas, and other smaller institutional projects, were critically celebrated for their groundbreaking achievements. In the next decade, MVVA’s commissions e
xpanded to a scale of landscape in which it was possible to achieve an “ecological urbanism,” with projects such as the Master Plans for Brooklyn Bridge Park and Wellesley College, and built work like Mill Race Park and Allegheny Riverfront Park. The office works closely with urban planners, architects, engineers, and ecologists, and as a result, MVVA has emerged as an innovative leader of multidisciplinary urban design teams. The firm’s collaborative approach and integrated design methodology ensures that the experience of MVVA’s built landscapes grows from, and is supported by, integrated sustainability, outstanding environmental performance, financial resourcefulness, material resilience, technical innovation, and material expression. The firm is led by its three principals, Laura Solano, Matthew Urbanski, and Michael Van Valkenburgh, who have worked as a team for over twenty years, and by an extremely capable and talented group of seventeen senior associates, with the support of a remarkable group of staff with academic backgrounds in a broad range of allied disciplines. The multi-disciplinary fluency of the MVVA staff is one of the firm’s greatest assets.
