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Laura Solano’s early studies in botany have served her well in her 17 years with Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates, a firm acclaimed for rediscovering the expressive potential of plants, soils and climatic effects. The firm’s design approach is rooted in the site itself and considers past events and social context as well as natural environment. “We try to extract from the site what is particular about it, what its qualities are that can then be brought forth in the final design,” Laura Solano said.

In addition to heading MVVA’s Cambridge office, Solano has been a visiting critic and lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design since 1992, where she teaches classes in landscape technology. She relishes every step of the design process, from the first rough sketches to the final installation of hardscape and plants. “I try to use my sixth sense about how things should go together, how to carry an idea that’s a seed all the way through to the manifestation of that idea,” she said.

Teardrop Park in New York’s Battery Park City exemplifies the firm’s inventive response to site and painstaking craftsmanship. Wedged between four 210- to 235-foot-tall apartment buildings, the two-acre park evokes a Catskills glen in the midst of Manhattan. MVVA claimed the space with a single gutsy move: a 27-foot-high stacked bluestone wall inspired by highway cuts in New York’s Catskill Mountains. The wall became a fulcrum for the site, its massive limestone portal defining the threshold between a grassy bowl-shaped area suitable for contemplation (or in the case of small children, rolling downhill) and a more active play area with a steep slide embedded in bluestone, granite and limestone sourced from the Hudson River Valley. Trees and plants native to New York State complement the 3,000 tons of native stone used within the park.

Solano credits the success of Teardrop Park to the simplicity of its program, which invites city kids to get really close to nature. “By having them climb rocks, have their legs brushed by plants and see the sequencing of plants over the seasons, we felt we could give urban kids a special experience,” she said. Other notable projects that Solano has led include Marion Square in Charleston, S.C., Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh, Pa., and Don River Park in Toronto, Canada.

In her lecture Laura Solano will try to pinpoint when (and how) American designers turned from European models – the English park, the French allée – to landscape expressions particular to the United States.