Architect brings fresh spin to Maggie Daley Park

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