Michael Van Valkenburgh

Mary Margaret Jones is president and CEO of Hargreaves Jones. Her decades in landscape architecture and planning have been significant around the globe, including designing Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, Scissortail Park in Oklahoma, Discovery Green in Houston. Zaryadye Park in Moscow and Crissy Field in San Francisco, revitalizing cities, institutions and communities. She is the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award and over a hundred national and international awards. 

Michael Van Valkenburgh is one of the most celebrated landscape architects in the world. He founded his firm, MVVA, in 1982, the same year he started and continues to teach at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Michael has projects around the world, ranging from small gardens, like the one he created for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, to major urban designs like the City Arch River Project at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the transformative Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City. 1.3 miles long and more than 20 years in the making, over five million people visit every year: it set a benchmark for waterfront projects around the world. 

James Corner is one of the planet's foremost landscape architects and the founder of Field Operations. Based in New York City, he has celebrated projects around the globe, including Chicago's redeveloped Navy Pier, London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and New York's High Line, a one and a half mile park built atop an abandoned railroad that attracts more visitors than the Metropolitan Museum or even the Statue of Liberty. James Corner is a theoretician, the author of numerous books, as well as an enormously influential practitioner. 

Mario Schjetnan, an architect and landscape architect and the founder of Grupo de Diseño Urbano, is based in Mexico City. He has shaped the open spaces of modern Mexico for nearly five decades, passionately committed to social engagement and environmental justice. Among many acclaims during his career – Mario recently received the profession’s highest honor: the 2025 Oberlander Prize. The jury cited his ability to “bridge the ethical and the aesthetic, advocating for access to nature in the city as a fundamental human right.” 

The first episode of Season 2 of INSIGHTS is a conversation with the late Kongjian Yu, the pioneering Chinese architect and urban planner who was tragically killed in a plane crash in the Amazon in the fall of 2025. No one was leading the way more boldly to save our planet from the climate crisis than Kongjian Yu. He was world famous for his successes in China and around the world. Kongjian’s core philosophy is Sponge City, a landscape infrastructure based on the idea that land can retain, mitigate, and purify rainwater. To describe it he himself evoked an ancient Chinese martial art: “doing tai chi with water.”

87-year old Israeli-Canadian-American architect Moshe Safdie, remains unstoppable with new projects from Singapore to Bentonville, Arkansas. He’s the recipient of the Gold Medal, the highest honor, from both the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the American Institute of Architects. Moshe discusses his Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore where expansion is about to begin on what’s become Singapore’s national landmark. The huge hotel’s three towers include a casino, a conference center, a shopping mall, an art museum, and a spectacular rooftop infinity pool that overlooks the scenic bay.

93-year old architect, theorist and professor Peter Eisenman, holds a place in architectural history as one of the New York Five, and the founder of Deconstructivism. He’s the recipient of the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And he has made a lifelong commitment to teaching, serving on the faculty of Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Cooper Union and Cambridge. He now teaches at Cornell University in Manhattan where he plans to adapt his newest course on the genealogy of architecture as the subject of his 28th book.

Visionary architect Rem Koolhaas has been shaping and disrupting architecture for his entire career. At age 80, he is the youngest of Victoria’s guests and remains a prolific writer and one of the world’s most influential architects with multiple new projects including the expansion of NYC’s New Museum opening Fall 2025.

In one of the final interviews of his life, Frank Gehry is the patriarch of this podcast series. He died just a few months after this conversation, at the age of 96. Frank and Victoria had a friendship spanning more than 40 years, traveling the globe together to visit his buildings. Frank discusses his $1 billion Guggenheim Museum, about to open in Abu Dhabi and other pivotal moments in his extraordinary career.

90-year old Raj Rewal is one of the most distinguished Indian architects of all time – and Victoria’s old friend. He is the architect of Delhi’s most important Modern buildings and with many masterpieces published in the History of World Architecture. His work, recently displayed at an exhibition of Post-Colonial architecture at MoMA,  is displayed in the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Raj talks about his latest creative passion – miniature paintings and drawings inspired by historical Indian works of art.