Wild by Design: ten landscape projects

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Mar g i e R u d d i c k

Wil d b y D es i g n : te n l a n d s c a p e p ro j e c t s

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I love wild places. I love cities. I like working at an infinitesimal scale. And with colossal infrastructure.

I like the messy margins where life happens. I like the simple, clean lines of minimalism; I like the

profuseness and discipline of the Baroque.

I like to find the point where the orderly becomes wild. And the point just before wildness becomes,

well, a mess.

Sometimes I am a control freak, obsessing over details.

Sometimes I don’t seem to design at all, I simply set a process in motion.

I design with diagrams, rough sketches, and plans that I draw with a Pilot Razorpoint. But often I design

with my feet, walking, feeling what a place is like, and letting the landscape materialize.

I like work that gets at utility, material, expression; that is economical, luxuriant, beautiful; slightly

strange. Landscapes that are generous, and alive; that are both deep and light.

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Wil d b y D es i g n : t e n l a n d s c a p e p ro j e c t s

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1. Porous Queens Plaza

2. Contained Urban Garden Room

3. Fine Miami Bayfront

4. Coarse Shillim Retreat and Institute

5. Dry Casa Cabo

6. Wet Trenton Capital Parks

7. Mine Philadelphia Reforestation Garden

8. Theirs Boxwood Farm

9. Quiet Kinderhood Park

10 Ecstatic New York Aquarium Perimeter Project

Wil d b y D es i g n : t e n l a n d s c a p e p ro j e c t s

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1 Poro u s

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Poro u s

In 2003, New York City’s Department of City Planning selected a team that was charged with reinventing the tangled and hostile landscape of streets, elevated trains, bridges, aborted bikeways and traffic medians at Queens Plaza, the gateway to Long Island City. Over the next eight years, the broad confluence of streets and resid-ual spaces was transformed into a hybrid landscape: not just infra-structure, not just street, not just park or refuge, not just conduit. The design wove these threads into a civic space that is of the street, of the neighborhood, of the elements, of the culture. It has trans-formed life for residents of Long Island City and beyond, who can now commute by bicycle with ease into Manhattan, and who have eagerly claimed the 5-acre green open space as a place to gather, to rest, and to recharge. Queens Plaza was one of the two pilot projects for New York City’s High Performance Infrastructure Guidelines. The RFP was the first we encountered that called for sustainable design to be placed front and center.

At the same time, our definition of sustainable design had begun to grow more complex than the VENN diagram of

social environmental

economic

We came to believe that it was the intersection of art, ecology and infrastructure that drove our urban landscape design work and measured its success.

art ecology

infrastructure

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Queens Plazaand Dutch Kills Green

Long Island City, New YorkCompleted 2012

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Our team integrated environmental artist Michael Singer into the whole of our design process, so that we did not just iden-tify opportunities for art to exist within the landscape, but we con-sidered every aspect of the design as a medium for art. For Long Island City’s thriving community of artisans and artists, industrial designers and fabricators, and such important institutions as PS 1 and the temporary MOMA, the landscape needed to speak to something beyond best practices. We wanted to express, through the designing and crafting of all the elements- from curbs to bench-es to grated walkways- what was happening in this landscape. We wanted to render visible the forces of water, wind and sun as they moved through the landscape. Phase 2 of the project, still to be constructed, reveals the elevated structures and bridge through a series of mesh and light “rooms,” which clarify the rhythms of the structure, transforming it from a tangle of steel into an elegant, lan-tern-like serial installation.

The diverse strips of planting along the medians absorb storm water, temper the harsh environment, and improve air qual-ity. A broad swath of Ironwood trees arcs along the elevated struc-

ture at JFK Park, enfolding and sheltering the refuge-like park landscape. A river of understory trees – shad, redbud, magnolia – meander within the park, then along the medians, down to the river. This immersive green landscape radically challenges the con-ventional notion of an urban park/streetscape as hardscape. The artists and designers created a language of permeable pavers that can be planted, where there will be minimal circulation (or hand-tight) in major walkways, reflecting the movement of the human body through the spaces. The benches bring the language of the ground-plane landscape into relief.

After less than a year since opening, Queens Plaza is teem-ing with people walking, jogging, biking, strolling, lunching, meet-ing and reading. The project’s success is as much because of its po-rous boundaries – you are directed into and through it via five or six different pathways, and then out into the City again. At Queens Plaza, a former traffic island/parking lot is now a refuge, and the in-frastructure that was once reviled is now fully engaged in the streets of the city, and is once again beautiful.

Queens Plaza

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Transforming the one-mile tangle of infrastructure that runs from Sunny-side Yards to the East River into a lush green corridor welcoming to pedestri-ans and bicyclists.

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This early ideagram shows how we would transform the infrastructure into a place where energy, light, water, and plantings would reinvent connections through the site.

Queens Plaza

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We worked to develop a landscape language for the site – showing how we could integrate water, movement, plantings, energy, shade, and signage.

Working with the artist Michael Singer we developed the idea of rain gardens to handle the tremendous amount of storm water running off the Queensboro Bridge, cultivating lush plantings.

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Queens Plaza

The system of berms, planting, expressed steel curbs, and pedestrian and bicycle paths stretches out at JFK park to become an embracing landscape. The blue vegetation at the park’s center denotes subsurface wetlands that filter storm water from the site. This project was a pilot project for New York City’s High Perfor-mance Infrastructure Guidelines.

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Queens Plaza

A long arc of hornbeams leans against the curving elevated train structure; the subsurface wetland arcs through the Park’s center; a wild river of understory trees including Shad and Redbud meanders along the western edge of the park. The New York City Department of City Planning encouraged us to create a lush, green refuge.

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Queens Plaza

The sustainable landscape – integrating shading, permeable paving, subsur-face wetlands – looks and feels softer, more casual, than the traditional urban streetscape.

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The streets and bike lanes and pedestrian ways work together with both the graphic of traffic and the linear lines of plantings and furnishings.

Queens Plaza

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Artist Michael Singer worked with the team to design curbs that conduct storm water into the subsurface wetland, and down to recharge groundwater. Small outlets in the sculpted curb allow the water to flow from the path down into the wetland. Michael Singer Studio fabricated all of the artist-designed curbs, pavers and benches at his studio.

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In 2005, when we were first presenting these images, many design-ers from allied fields were put off by how wild this image looks. By 2011, the image was more readable to the general public, and the project began to win recognition in fields such as architecture and interiors.

Margie Ruddick/WRT/Marpillero Pollak Architects

Queens Plaza

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Sam Oberter

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Queens Plaza

Looking back toward JFK Park, the infrastructure becomes a series of hanging lanterns, providing wayfinding as well as beauty. This phase of the project is led by team architects and urban designers Marpillero Pollak Architects.

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Queens Plaza

The new JFK park at the east end of the site is a refuge for people who live and work here.

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2 Conta i ned

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I was asked by the Durst Organization to design something “green” for their new Urban Garden Room, the green space that would grace the ground floor of One Bryant Park, the Bank of America Building that is the first LEED Platinum sky-scraper in New York City. The space is narrow and high. Trees wouldn’t work there, because of the low light levels. It occurred to me that what they were asking for – something green, that you could feel like you are inside, something natural-feeling – was sculpture, a living green sculpture that you could feel im-mersed in. The space is so contained, it seemed necessary to do something a little fantastical, something you could disappear into. Instead of fixing on something simple and elegant, like the lobby and the room itself, we designed a sculpture, a living, green environment that you feel immersed in - like walking into one of those shoebox dioramas.

Conta i ned

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Urban Garden Room

Bank of America Building, New York City

Completion Date: Fall, 2009

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Urban Garden Room

We were inspired by these images of the fern canyons of Northern California. We wanted visitors to feel not only relief from the city, but an atmosphere of earth and freshness.

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Urban Garden Room

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Urban Garden Room

I asked my mother, Dorothy Ruddick, a Black Mountain-trained sculptor, to collaborate with us on the project. She helped us finesse the forms to give them depth and movement.

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We worked with Mosaiculture Internationale de Montreal, who constructed the four sculptural objects in thirteen pieces, planted them in their greenhouses in Lavalle, Quebec, and then shipped them down on September 12, 2009, to be assembled on the site. The interiors of the structures are steel, with a wire mesh around them. Geotextile fabric was stapled onto the mesh; the insides of the structures were packed with a light growing medium, and snaked through with irrigation lines. The plants were then planted in holes in the fabric. After three months of growth, the plants had grown together, and the sculptures were ready to go.

Urban Garden Room

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People are always in the Urban Garden Room, from opening to closing. It feels cool, and moist, and the air feels cleaner. The Urban Garden Room is an expres-sion of an idea about a green canyon; it is an expression of green, the signature green space for the city’s ultimate green building.

Urban Garden Room

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3 Fi ne

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Fi ne

For an island retreat overlooking Biscayne Bay and downtown Miami, I felt that a green, “landscaped” garden would never be able to compete with all that water, sky and light; what I really wanted to do was bring the land out into the water, the water into the land, and the sky into the water. You arrive at the house, a traditional 1920s villa, and move through one of two wild gardens – the side jungle, or the ginger garden off the kitchen – and encounter….. water. Water everywhere. And reflected in the water is the sky, which transforms more than hourly from a pacific dome to a fury of storm clouds. Being at the water in this area is an elemental experience. I wanted to enhance that sense of being in the wilder landscape, and not looking out at it.

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Bayfront Garden

Miami Beach, Florida

Completed January 2013

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Bayfront Garden

You either walk through a very deep dark jungly garden, or a kitchen garden of palms and gingers, to get to the waterfront garden.

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Bayfront Garden

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Bayfront Garden

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Bayfront Garden

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Bayfront Garden

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Bayfront Garden

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Bayfront Garden

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4 Co a rs e

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A 2,500-acre bowl in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India, changes from intense, saturated green in the monsoon to desert red in the hot summer months. The planning and design went against resort conventions, dispersing the program through 200 acres of disturbed slopes and valleys at the lowest elevation, conserv-ing the more fragile forests, high ridges, and ravines. The hundred rooms are arrayed along the lower slopes, which had been eroded by years of cutting trees for fuel and grazing cattle. We revegetated the slopes, cut thousands of meters of contour trenches to recharge groundwater and cultivate new grasslands and shrubland, and sited the rooms individually by hand, finding the places where the fewest trees would be cut.

The design of this project situated all the building and landscapes in relation to this coarse, wild landscape.

Co a rs e

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S h i l l im R e tre at

Maharashtra, India

Un d er C onstr u c ti onC omp l e ti on Date : Fa l l 2 0 1 1

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Erosion over the years has pushed all of the richer soils down into the valley, where rice fields are being transformed into an organic farm.

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The high ridge surrounds a diverse forest that supports a multitude of species, from barking deer to the occasional panther. We stated at the beginning of this project that this area woud be off-limits to development

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The landscape of Shillim – the forests, the high ridges, the benches and buttes – is the main content of the spa at Shillim. A series of walks, hikes, and climbs are as important to the wellness program as the spa treatments.We sited each of the different components of the retreat within a landscape with a distinct character: over ten years we revegetated the eroded slopes and sited half of the suites among this growing forest; so that by the retreat’s opening in 2013, they will have earned their name of “forest suite,” as the forest had grown up to meet them. The village guest rooms are sited on the lower benches, grounded in the earth, with entry gardens where at least one specimen of Tulsi, or Holy Basil, grows. This plant is grown traditionally in the region for medicinal and religious uses, and people often plant one or more outside their front door. The spa is sited at the base of one of the major nallahs, or drainage ways, acting as a dam for rain water, and looking out over the terraced fields that become a water landscape dur-ing and after the monsoon. The spiritual retreat is sited high up on a plateau that is filled with geodes of crystal. The Shillim Institute is sited on the valley floor, next to an existing village, whose residents have been hired not only as hotel staff but to propagate plants and run the nursery, and to provide their deep knowledge of the plants and animals that live there.

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Village guest rooms orient out to the valley, with views of the surrounding ridges and forests. They have been cut into the back of the benches, to ground them in the landscape.

The forest suites cantilever out over the emerging forest, cultivated in the past ten years.

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The project architect Steven Harris and his design associate Tom Zook and I did studies of how the buildings and landscape could work together, being more like landscape-building. The relaxation center is both carved into and built onto a bench overlooking the spa zone; the meditation room is buried in the earth. The buildings for the spiritual retreat hover slightly over the edge of the high benches.

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One of my jobs was to keep certain places – special sites such as this butte, up in the sky – empty. We sited the spiritual retreat buildings just below these high plains, so that when you finally reach the top you encounter the emptiness of the place.

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My job also involved setting the systems in place that would integrate the people living in and around the village of Bodchilwadi, which sits on the floor of the site’s valley, next to the main nallah, into the programs of the retreat. We started the nursery in 2002, to provide the new plantings for the retreat, and to provide additional income from sales. The team also built a new dam for the village, bringing their water source for their daily tasks such as laundry a hundred meters closer.

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The nursery has grown over 100,000 plants; the organic farming practices were started in 2004; in the seven years between then and 2011, the process of transi-tioning the soils from dependence on (and saturation with) pesticides to a richer and chemical free state was completed.

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The knowledge that people who live in this valley have of the landscape offers a great lesson about sustainability, which is at the heart of Shillim Institute: at the height of the summer, when temperatures reach over 40 degrees centigrade, this elder digs down four feet into the dry earth, to find land crabs to eat. They survive in the moisture retained in the soil even nine months after the monsoon. The In-stitute’s program revolve around preserving and promoting a way of life in which we feel we can have enough, making do with what we have on hand.

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5 D r y

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In one of the handful of places where the desert meets the sea, the convention was to design lush, green, irrigated oases. Restoring the desert as a living landscape, we studied how desert plantings occur, when wind- or bird-borne seeds find op-portunity in places where water and soils can support their growth. We used the idiosyncratic patterns of plant growth to create a brown roof, the desert version of a green roof.

D r y

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Casa Cabo

Cabo San Lucas, Baja California

Completion Date: 2002

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Casa Cabo

We also challenged the convention of siting buildings in the middle of a piece of land, and creating a big pile with terrace pools. Casa Cabo is actually a series of voids, desert gardens surrounded by an array of modestly scaled buildings.

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We brought the desert landscape into the domestic zone.

Casa Cabo

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Cactus, aloe, and agave were planted as they are found in the desert, in odd num-bers, sometimes singly, and underplanted with grasses that support desert life – breaking with the recent convention of planting desert plants in large swaths, with gravel mulch.

What happens when you bring the wild desert landscape into the domestic world? It becomes something else, supporting wildlife but also responding to a human order.

Casa Cabo

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Casa Cabo

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Casa Cabo

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Casa Cabo

We adapted the language of stone and stabilized earth for storm-water drainage – the voids in the rock paving let water flow down into a trench drain, where it lets out into the runnel along the bottom of the wall.

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This is a landscape design that is forgiving – the bars of the building are sited at differ-ent angles, so the concrete paving strips come and go without favoring one side or the other. When they met a rock, they just moved around it. We used the local sand to make the stabilized earth, and tinted the concrete to match the indigenous stone, and the sand.

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The site design splays in and out as it moves down the hill, ending in the pool, which juts out toward the sea.

Casa Cabo

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We restored desert habitat in the gaps and crevices in the rocks. Soon birds and butterflies found the sweet spots nestled between the existing rock and new concrete.

Casa Cabo

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The pool launches you out over the pacific, where whales perform their annual migrations.

Casa Cabo

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6 Wet

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Wet

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Trenton Capital Park

Trenton, New Jersey

Phase I Under ConstructionCompletion Date: Fall 2011

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Reinventing a landscape of parking lots and highways: A new network of parks orients the city back to the river, garden bridges over new wetlands. We create the Capitol Green, a lush riverine river terrace, a sculpture garden for the mu-seum, and garden bridges connecting the Capitol district to a new residential neighborhood.

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The Capitol Green is the new living room for the city, with the Capitol dome above and the river below. Water from an old spring is daylighted, running into a wetland that arcs around the civic lawn.

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A new watercourse that recirculates storm water also reestablishes the presence of water on the site, where both a man-made canal and natural spring formed a water landscape, long since filled in.

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The garden bridges span the old beams left over from moving the highway in-board. We remove the flood walls to create wetland terraces down to the conflu-ence of the Assunpink Creek and the Delaware.

This image speaks to the desire to reinvent Trenton as a city inseparable from its powerful river.

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7 Mi ne

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Mi ne

My own back (and front) yard have helped develop a lot of the ideas that have taken shape in my book Wild By Design. It is my lab – an empty third-of-an-acre rectangle of lawn when I bought it in 2005, it has gradually transformed from Chemlawn to ratty meadow to productive forest and garden. I love the idea that the panoramas shown here look kind of horrible – no designer would put his or her name to it. But if I hadn’t passed through this phase – what I call in my practice “The Ugly Phase” – I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now. It is a layered and beautiful habitat for me, my family, many more bird species than were here when I arrived, at least two possums, garden snakes, and many creatures unknown to or unseen by me. And crickets galore.I “let it go,” but that doesn’t mean my landscape isn’t the product of design. I manage the landscape – coppicing the black cherries to form a kind of broad, wide hedge; planting grasses, ornamental plants, including roses – and sometimes take drastic measures, like pulling out the entire groundplane of the emerging forest when an invasion of Japanese Stiltgrass landed and exploded. .

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Philadelphia Reforestation Garden

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Evolving

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When I close my eyes I can feel how different the landscape is from when I moved in. Sounds, scents, textures – it used to be barren, and now it’s alive. It took seven years to turn into something productive and beautiful, to go from code violation (I did receive a summons) to garden tour (yes, in 2012). And seven years just happens to be approximately the amount of time it takes for a farmed piece of earth to rid itself of many generations of pesticides and other toxins, and become “organic.”

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I had to cut down a dead Silver Maple in 2005, but I left around eighteen feet of the double trunk – it has become a good snag, at-tracting woodpeckers and other creatures. My bat box, nailed to the north side of one trunk, has never been colonized, but bats did arrive around the fifth year, finding a home somewhere in the vicinity.

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: In the landscape karma department, a weeping cherry – I had always dreaded the client query of “Where can I put my weeping cherry?” so what happened in my own little spot? A weeping cherry seeded in by itself, along with the red oaks, right next to my driveway. I love it now.

When we were planting the yucca/herb garden in the hot, dry terrace beside the driveway, Roddy and his guys unearthed all of these chunks of Wissa-hickon Schist. I asked them to place them on the concrete pad I had never figured what to do with, outside of the loft-like living space. I just left them there, adding some corals and other pieces of stone I found on jobs in far-away places. When weeds started growing in a crack in the concrete, I kept them trimmed, so it looks like I planted a weird L-shaped double line of herbaceous plants. But this past year a mulberry took root, and I am re-thinking this terrace to welcome a shade tree that will drop its purple berries once a year.

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8 The i rs

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The i rs

I have always worked closely with clients who have their own vision, or aesthetic, or habits. The clients for this project – a famous songwriter and a fashion icon – are in possession and in command of all three. Working with them I moved from pattern and field – the grids of boxwood – to figure, and sculpture. But through it all we kept reorienting to the surrounding forest.

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Boxwood Farm

Oldwick, New Jersey

Completed 1994Revisited Fall 2010

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Boxwood Farm

Working with architect Steven Harris, we restored this suburbanized landscape to its agricultural roots. The farm compound is simple, planar, and reconnected with the surrounding woodland.

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Boxwood Farm

The boxwood farm itself – 8 acres carved out of successional woodland – was planted with three varieties of hardy Korean boxwood. I laid out three grids that are perceivable from one vantage point – the client’s upstairs vanity window – but that become maze-like when you walk through them, sometimes losing their griddedness altogether.

As you stroll through the lines of boxwood, you grasp the patterns, then lose them. The lines of the main axes of the grids pull you out into the forest.

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Boxwood Farm

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Boxwood Farm

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Boxwood Farm

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9 Q ui et

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When I was in graduate school, Pete Walker stopped at my desk to see what I was up to, and after the third or fourth point I was trying to address, he stopped me. “Margie,” he told me, “you have to lower your level of thinking.” I did not want to do this, to think up one big idea and to devote every part of the design to the support of that one idea. But I was spending a lot of money at school, and figured I better do what he told me, so I decided to do a paving pattern, that was it. No plants, no program, just a huge paving pattern. I learned a lot about paving pat-terns. Thankfully I have reverted to pursuing multiple ideas in a lot of my work. But sometimes a project evolves to be about one thing. The Kinderhook park I designed with Steven Harris and Lucien Rees Roberts, and to which landscape designer David Kelly has now added his own vision, is simply an expression of topography, and the ways in which it supports different habitats: meadow, copse, pond, forest. That’s it. Sometimes it is wonderful to turn off most of the mind chatter and fol-low one idea, or one process, giving yourself a number of rules and seeing where it takes you.

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Kinderhook Compound

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Kinderhook Compound

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Kinderhook Compound

I regraded the entire approach, to orient you out to the meadow, down to the copse of poplars and birch-es, and up to the meadow again.

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Kinderhook Compound

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In its first incarnation, the original structure was a painting studio for Lucien Rees Roberts. I sited the entry steps within the new, mounding topography; we experimented with meadow over several season, watching how it transforms the built world.

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Kinderhook Compound

After ten years, Steven Harris added a second structure – in fact an exact copy of the first structure’s envelope and footprint, but providing more ample living space. We floated the new structure in the meadow. My former student and now collaborator, David Kelly, took on the implementation of this phase, adding his own flourishes, including a long pond at the low point of the forested valley below.

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Kinderhook Compound

The topography rolls between forest and copse. We sited sculptures out within this ever changing landscape.

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Kinderhook Compound

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At the end of the long formal lawn panel the bio-pond, with its croaking frogs, comes as quie a surprise.

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Kinderhook Compound

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1 0 E c s tati c

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In 2006 I invited two architects to work with me on an invited competition to de-sign a new perimeter for the New York Aquarium at Coney Island. This was the diagram I drew at our first working session: a light structure that raised up above the aquarium and the beach and the street, creating a new member in the family of constructions that have given Coney Island its identity, such as the Cyclone and the Parachute Jump. I knew that we needed to rethink the perimeter on the ground – I invited two Austrian architects, Peter Ebner and Franziska Ullmann, to design the earth-based structures at the ground. But I knew we needed light, since Coney Island is all about light, so I invited Barcelona architect Enric Ruiz-Geli of Cloud 9, known for his scrims, or skins, of LEDs, to design an ephemeral structure of light.

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New York Aquarium Perimeter Project

Coney Island, New York

Concept Design CompletedNo completion date

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The plan pulled the exhibits of the aquarium outside of the facility’s walls: a new dune ecology would rise up on the ocean side of the boardwalk; a new tidal habitat would be built in between the existing groins at the beach. I worked with a marine biologist with the Army Corps of Engineers who is experimenting with creating new ephemeral habitat in just such a condition, new tidal pools con-structed on the beach between existing groins, or jetties.

The landscape plan shows how the perimeter, far from acting as a boundary for the aquarium, creates a porous membrane through which the aquarium’s pro-grams flow in and out.

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The skin of the new perimeter would interact with the sun: 40,000 solar-powered LEDs would glow different colors according to how much sun they received each day, from blue at the highest solar exposure to red at the lowest. Water would also flow through the skins, filtering the aquarium’s water. The skins work as the aquarium’s gills.

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The aquarium from the ocean, as

it exists now

The aquarium as it would exist

with its new web perimeter

cloud 9 / WRT

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cloud 9 / WRT

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The model for the perimeter, which in Ruiz-Geli’s workshop became a whole overarching structure, was made by a Barcelona dress designer. Everything the team created, from the shimmering skins to the sparkling model, had an exuber-ance to it, inspired by the fantastical matrix of marine life both inside and out. The work was not simply a celebration of the marine world; it was an ecstatic expression of it.

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As a landscape designer, I knew that landscape alone would not sufficiently rein-vent the aquarium. The web and landscape design gave the entire aquarium new life.

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cloud 9 / WRT

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For over twenty years, Margie Ruddick has been recognized for work that in-tegrates great landscape design with ecology, culminating in being awarded the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in landscape architecture. Margie’s transformative design for New York’s Queens Plaza has won awards for forging a new idea of nature in the city, where storm water, wind, sun, and habitat merge within an urban infrastructure to create a more sustainable vision of urban life. The new waterfront at Stapleton, in New York City, brings the harbor and city together in a park with cove and tidal wetlands, catalyzing the revitalization of this historic Staten Island district. Trenton Capital Park restores the connection between the city and the Delaware. Margie’s international projects include the Shillim Institute and Retreat in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India; she has remained with the project as a member of the Institute’s board. She traveled to Chengdu, Sichuan, China in 1996 to lead a team designing the Living Water Park, the first ecological park in China, which cleans polluted river water biologi-cally.

Margie has taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Yale, The University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design, and Schumacher College in England. Her many awards include the 1998 Waterfront Centre Award and the 1999 Plac-es Design Award, for the Living Water Park; her work has received awards from

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the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Institute of Architects. Margie was selected by the Architectural League of New York as one of their emerging voices in 2003. She received the 2002 Lewis Mumford Award from Architects Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility, the 2006 Ra-chel Carson Women in Conservation Award from the National Audubon Society, an award that recognizes “visionary women whose contributions, talent, and energy have advanced conserva-tion and environmental education locally and on a global scale.” In 2010 Margie was named one of the top ten women in green design by the Green Economy Post.

Margie was born in Montreal, grew up in New York City, and attended Bowdoin College and Harvard University’s Gradu-ate School of Design. She ran her own practice from 1988 to 2004, when she became a partner at the planning and design firm WRT. Since 2007 she has worked on projects independently, in addition to writing, lecturing, and teaching. Her forthcoming book Wild by Design is in process with a publisher in New York.

EDUCATION

Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Master of Landscape Architecture, 1988

Bowdoin College, Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, 1979

WORK EXPERIENCE

Margie Ruddick ASLA 2007 to present

Principal, WRT 2004-2007

Margie Ruddick landscape 1995-2004

Heintz Ruddick, New York 1988-1997

Central Park Conservancy 1983-1985

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Visiting Full Professor, Princeton Unviversity School of Architecture Fall 2011

Visiting Lecturer, Schumacher College, UK 2007

Visting Critic, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2006

Visitng Lecturer, Schumacher College, UK 2005

Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Landscape Architecture, 1997-2003

Lenahan Memorial Graduate Seminar on Landscape, Yale University, School of Architecture, 1997

Visiting Critic, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1995

Professor of Environmental Design, Parsons School of Design, 1991-1995

Wild by Design: ten landscape projects

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