Margie Ruddick

Landscape Designer / United States / Margie Ruddick Landscape

www.margieruddick.com

Margie Ruddick is an international, award-winning landscape designer. For over 20 years, she has been recognized for her pioneering, environmental approach to urban landscape design, forging a design language that integrates ecology, urban planning, and culture.

Her transformative design for New York’s Queens Plaza has won awards for promoting a new idea of nature in the city, where stormwater, wind, sun, and habitat merge within an urban infrastructure to create a more sustainable vision of urban life. Her design for 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. Similarly, her work for the Trenton Capital Park restores the connection between the city and the Delaware River.  

Ruddick’s international projects include the Shillim Institute and Retreat in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India. She remains with this project as a member of the Institute’s board. Ruddick also traveled to Chengdu, Sichuan, China to work with artist Betsy Damin designing the Living Water Park, the first ecological park in China, which cleans polluted river water biologically.

  In addition to her recent teaching position at Princeton University, Margie Ruddick has taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design, and Schumacher College in England.

Ruddick was recognized as a finalist for the 2011 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards.   Her many other awards include the 1998 Waterfront Centre Award and the 1999 Places Design Award, for the Living Water Park. Her work has received awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Institute of Architects.   Margie Ruddick was selected by the Architectural League of New York for its 2003 Emerging Voices. She received the 2002 Lewis Mumford Award from Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, as well as the 2006 Rachel Carson Women in Conservation Award from the National Audubon Society, an award that recognizes “visionary women whose contributions, talent, and energy have advanced conservation and environmental education locally and on a global scale.” Ruddick was named as one of the top ten women in green design by the Green Economy Post in 2010.  

Margie Ruddick was born in Montreal and raised in New York City. She graduated from Bowdoin College and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

She founded and managed her own practice, initially with landscape architect Judith Heintz, from 1988 to 2004, when Ruddick 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 is Wild by Design.

comments powered by Disqus

Announcements

Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture by Robert A.M. Stern

Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture

By Robert A.M. Stern
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2022

Architect, historian, and educator Robert A. M. Stern presents a personal and candid assessment of contemporary architecture and his fifty years of practice.

Order the book.

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

Order the book.

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman

Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People

By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022

Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.

Order the book.

Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York by Steven Heller

Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York

By Steven Heller
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: October 2022

An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times, that takes readers on a visually inspired look back at being at the center of New York’s youth culture in the 1960s and ’70s.

Pre-order the book.

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

Order the book.

Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books by John Hill

Buildings in Print: 100 Influential and Inspiring Illustrated Architecture Books

By John Hill
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
Published: June 2021

This unique volume by the founder of the hugely influential architecture blog A Daily Dose of Architecture showcases the best illustrated architecture books ever published with an informed, personal, and engaging take on what makes the title unique and indispensable.

Order the book.