Margie Ruddick, FASLA

Ms. Ruddick is an internationally known, award-winning landscape designer. For over twenty 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. Ms. Ruddick founded and managed her own practice from 1988 until 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. Ms. Ruddick’s transformative design for New York’s Queens Plaza has won awards for promoting 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.  Her international projects include the Shillim Institute and Retreat in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, India. She also 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 biologically. Ms. Ruddick was a finalist for the 2011 Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards.  Her forthcoming book is What Are We Doing Here Anyway? Adventures in Sustainable Design.  She graduated from Bowdoin College and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Photo Courtesy Central Park Conservancy