“Between Form and Circumstance: Re-thinking the Contemporary Landscape. The recent practice of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates” ended on May 24.

Five projects were displayed. They included Harvard?EUR??,,????'???s Alumnae Valley, where Van Valkenburgh made magic out of an abused corner of the campus; Teardrop Park in urban Manhattan; a rural park for a furniture factory in Georgia; the Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh; and by the far the most striking the huge Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is transforming a long stretch of rotting piers on the Brooklyn side of the East River into a place of recreation.

The Brooklyn design dominated the show because of its enormous (although crude) scale model. Here Van Valkenburgh had to deal not only with the East River at one edge, but also the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at the other, not to mention the Brobdingnagian abutments of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, the collapsing warehouses and piers, and the memory of the once-vital waterfront of Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

Landscape architecture is a too-little-known profession. Currently, though, it’s attracting more notice than usual. A recent major show at the Museum of Modern Art presented landscape designs from all over the world. And a current fad is to merge the architecture of buildings with the architecture of landscape. Thus landforms heave up into architectural shapes and buildings sprout green roofs. Van Valkenburgh doesn’t like this kind of merging, and thinks landscape should meet architecture “happily but unpredictably.”

Landscape architecture is hard to represent. A painting you just hang on the wall, a building you can represent pretty well with a scale model. But how do you present a landscape, perhaps one of many hundreds of acres, in an exhibit hall? Not to mention the fact that a landscape is never stable, but is always growing or decaying.