Like many cities, Tulsa reserves its budget for fire, public safety and other nuts and bolts concerns, not elaborate parks. The Gathering Place evolved from a more modest proposal to build small sites along the river between the city and the Tulsa county suburbs with public funds matched by private donations, a prospect that was defeated by county voters in 2007. “That caused us to rethink,” said Ken Levit, the George Kaiser Family Foundation’s executive director. “The result was a better thought-out plan in the core of the city with community input at the outset.”

The site consisted of four disparate parcels, including a 35-acre estate with a replica of Jefferson Davis’s house, since demolished. The foundation launched an international competition, winnowing 99 candidates to four. In 2011, Mr. Van Valkenburgh and his team touched down on an unplowed runway with over a foot of snow (still, it beats a tornado). The firm had just been awarded the commission for St. Louis’s Gateway Arch Park, which included a grass-covered land bridge over the interstate.

Since the opening of Teardrop Park in Battery Park City in 2006, a mini-version of upstate New York nestled amid skyscrapers, Mr. Van Valkenburgh and his partners have challenged prevailing notions of what an urban park can be. At Brooklyn Bridge Park along the East River’s edge, the site included rotting piers, defunct warehouses, land that flooded and an excruciatingly loud expressway. Mr. Van Valkenburgh and his team created a place, as he observed during walks, “where quinceañeras in orange taffeta dresses with Christmas lights on them stand in the archways of the ruins of a tobacco warehouse and a strange guy with a miniature Chemex and a demitasse cup sips coffee at dawn while looking at Lower Manhattan.”