The Dutch designer who will lead the creation of a park and promenade on Governors Island, Adriaan Geuze of West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, received a high-powered welcome Monday night at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Geuze started the working party clinking glasses with landscape architect Laurie Olin, a member of the jury that selected West 8 for its first commission in America, along with Rogers Marvel, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Quennell Rothschild, and SMWM.

He ended the party meeting the other Adrian in the room, the city’s commissioner of Parks and Recreation, Adrian Benepe, who was also on the selection panel.

“I am really keen to hear from you how you would position Governors Island,” Mr. Geuze told Mr. Benepe.

“Two of your ideas I like very much,” Mr. Benepe said, referring to creation of hills, affording climbers beautiful vistas, and an accessible shoreline that will allow people to touch the water.

“But there must be more,” Mr. Geuze said.

The two agreed to meet in August.

The design for the southern end of the island calls for mountains, fields of Dutch tulips, wetlands, and forests. All this man-made nature will provide shelter from the sun and the wind. “We have to bring ecology in, so people feel happy. It’s not a desert,” Mr. Geuze said. “It’s a place to be with your family.

“I’m from Holland. I’m not about wild stuff. It’s very precise, that’s my DNA,” Mr. Geuze said.

“Green is the operative word; Adriaan says, broccoli,” a member of the design team, Ricardo Scofidio, said.

The execution of the design plan begins this fall, with a ceremonial groundbreaking on construction planned for 2009.

For the duration of the cocktail party, hosted by Agnes Gund, Mr. Geuze bounced from one introduction to another, meeting some of New York’s doers and dreamers, such as the chairman of the planning commission, Amanda Burden; the co-founders of Friends of the High Line, Josh David and Robert Hammond, and Laurie Tisch, who recently funded the launch of green street carts in underserved neighborhoods.

“In this room is sort of the collective brilliance and amazing energy of New York City, and it is what is required to reconnect a place that was really closed and not part of our city for its entire history,” the president of Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, Leslie Koch, said.

As much as meeting the Dutchman, considered a star in Europe, generated excitement, the excitement also came from the idea that Governors Island is a unique opportunity to shape an urban landscape of the future.

“Governors Island is the 22nd-century getaway,” a landscape architect not involved in the project, the designer of the MoMA’s graffiti-patterned rooftop garden, Ken Smith, said.

Mr. Geuze is on that future-oriented wavelength. “I want to talk about the heritage we will create, let’s say in 100 years. This is a historic moment,” he said.

But first, Mr. Geuze will get to know how the city’s waterfront has already been shaped. Sculptor Mark di Suvero offered to give him a tour of Socrates Sculpture Park. “It took us 20 years to build. It was on a dump,” Mr. di Suvero told Mr. Geuze. “Do you know what a dump is?”

agordon@nysun.com