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Wild by Design – Margie Ruddick Landscape

Margie Ruddick, For over twenty years, Margie Ruddick has been recognized for her pioneering work in the landscape. Winner of the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in landscape architecture, Margie has forged a design language that integrates ecology 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 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 biologically.

Margie has taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Yale, Princeton, The University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design, and Schumacher College in England. In addition to the Cooper-Hewitt 2013 honor, her many awards include the 1998 Waterfront Centre Award and the 1999 Places Design Award, along with environmental artist Betsy Damon, for the Living Water Park; her work has received awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Institute of Architects. Margie was selected by the Architectural League of New York for their 2003 Emerging Voices. She received the 2002 Lewis Mumford Award from Architects Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility, 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.” Margie 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, grew up in New York City, and graduated from Bowdoin College and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She shared a practice with Judith Heintz from 1988 to 1995; then worked on her own on projects such as the Living Water Park in Chengdu until 2004, when she became a partner at the planning and design firm WRT. Since leaving WRT in 2007, she has developed Margie Ruddick Landscape as an innovative but pragmatic practice that can entertain new ideas and break boundaries but always within the context of what is buildable and economically feasible. The practice is kept to a maximum of eight total, so that each project can get the full attention of the professional team.

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MATERIA–VIVA

Gabriela Etchegaray, AMBROSI ETCHEGARAY

AMBROSI ETCHEGARAY, are an architectural practice co-founded in 2011 by Gabriela Etchegaray and Jorge Ambrosi. Their work involves designing projects, installations, exhibitions, and curatorial proposals. Their research focuses on art, geography and architecture relationships that take the forms of drawings, maps, texts, or documents. 

AMBROSI ETCHEGARAY were appointed as curator and designer of the Mexican Pavilion for La Biennale di Venezia 2018. Participant at the Exhibition Cycles in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, 2022. They were recognized as Design Vanguard 2017, and recipient of the 2015 Architectural League of New York Emerging Voices.

They have been invited to national and international schools of architecture as critic and lecturer; Etchegaray and Ambrosi are Adjunct Professor at Columbia GSAPP and teaches a Seminar at Universidad CENTRO in Mexico City. Through their work, AMBROSI ETCHEGARAY, explore the intersections between social values, living space, nature, gender, material, and immaterial explorations.

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Going Public

Igor Siddiqui, RA is Associate Professor of Architecture and Interior Design at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has served as a full-time faculty member since 2009. He currently holds the Gene Edward Mikeska Endowed Chair and is in his fifth year in the role of Program Director for Interior Design at the School of Architecture. 

 Siddiqui’s academic work – including teaching, research, and creative scholarship – contributes to the field of interiors as a body of theoretical and applied knowledge with a critical role in contemporary culture, while also seeking to expand what an architect does and looks like in the 21st century. His projects have been exhibited at a range of venues including at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale, the Contemporary Austin, SITE Santa Fe, SxSW, Fusebox Festival, Metro Show Art Fair, the Ogden Museum of Art, and Flux Factory, and has appeared in various professional and popular publications such as Dwell, Interior Design, the Architect’s Newspaper, Artforum, Texas Architect, and Smart Magazine. Siddiqui’s academic writing includes contributions to books  Digital Fabrication in Interior Design, Appropriate(d) Interiors, Textile Technology and Design: from Interior Space to Outer Space and  The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, and has appeared in peer-reviewed journals Interiors, Interiority, IDEA Journal, and International Journal of Interior Architecture and Spatial Design. After five years of service as Associate Editor for Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture (published by Taylor & Francis), Siddiqui was recently appointed as the journal’s Coeditor-in-Chief. In 2022 he was named the Educator of the Year by IIDA. 

 Prior to establishing his own practice  in 2006, Siddiqui worked with Kohn Pedersen Fox and 1100:Architect in New York City. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design, Cranbrook Academy, NYIT, and California College of the Arts. Siddiqui studied architecture at Yale and Tulane and is a registered architect in New York and Texas. He was born and raised in Croatia and currently splits his time between Austin, Texas and Paris, France. 

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Expanding Possibilities

Thom Mayne, is founding partner of Morphosis, established in 1972 as an interdisciplinary and collective architecture and planning practice involved in experimental design and research. Mayne’s distinguished honors include the Pritzker Prize (2005) and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (2013). He was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities 2009‒2016. Throughout his career, Mayne has remained active in the art world, exhibiting at leading national and international institutions, including a solo exhibition for Morphosis at the Pompidou Center in 2006. MoMA, SFMOMA, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Chicago Art Institute, The FRAC Centre, The Tchoban Foundation Museum for Architekturzeichnung, among others, hold Mayne’s artwork produced over the course of his 50 year-long career. In 2020, he published Strange Networks (Rizzoli), a monograph highlighting his exploration of combinatory systems. This investigation continues at Stray Dog Café, Mayne’s personal art and research space at Morphosis, where he leads his team of young designers and students on research projects, the creation of artworks, and the development of publications which document their creative output. 

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OUT OF OFFICE

Peggy Deamer is Professor Emerita of Yale University’s School of Architecture and principal in the firm of Deamer, Studio. She is the founding member of the Architecture Lobby, a group advocating for the value of architectural design and labor. She is the editor of Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present and The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design and the author of Architecture and Labor. Articles by her have appeared in Log, Avery Review, e-Flux, and Harvard Design Magazine amongst other journals. Her theory work explores the relationship between subjectivity, design, and labor in the current economy. She received the Architectural Record 2018 Women in Architecture Activist Award and the 2021 John Q. Hejduk Award.