Wild by Design Press Kit

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WILD BY DESIGN Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes

By Margie Ruddick (March 17, 2016) Washington, DC — In 2005, following two decades of professional accolades, Margie Ruddick created a new kind of garden that landed her in court. Through selective mowing, planting, pruning, and frequently doing no maintenance, the internationally renowned landscape designer, a winner of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, created a wild landscape that—while beautiful—was unlike any front yard her neighbors had ever seen. When she received a summons from the city citing her garden’s weed height, Ruddick questioned her “wild experiment” and began to wonder: What are the principles that make a landscape wild without being chaotic? It was this experience that set Ruddick on a mission to redefine the meaning of sustainable landscape design.

With Wild by Design: Strategies for Creating Life-Enhancing Landscapes (Publication Date: March 17, 2016), Ruddick delivers an inspirational guide for innovative landscape design that integrates ecology, urban planning, and culture. Her globe-spanning examples demonstrate how a project’s function and design can work in concert to create beautiful, healthy places that connect people with the natural systems around them. She argues that it’s not enough for a place to fulfill sustainability checklists with the optimized energy performance or stormwater management techniques; to invest people in landscapes, designers must also consider the cultural and artistic aspects of landscapes.

In Wild by Design, a beautiful four-color book, Ruddick contends that these new – wild by design – landscapes provide measurable benefits in the fields of habitat, health, and stewardship. Over five chapters, Ruddick defines and explores the strategies—reinvention, restoration, conservation, regeneration, and expression—that she has employed in her own work to give life, beauty, and meaning to landscapes.

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These strategies are the key to Ruddick’s landscape designs, strategies that change the way people interact with places. In the pioneering design of the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China, a functional water treatment plant cleansing the Funan River is also an inviting park for people to wander and enjoy nature. In New York’s game-changing design for Queens Plaza, Ruddick and her team took a hazardous, unsightly public space and reinvented it as a respite where pedestrians and bicyclists can not only travel safely, but also sit and relax.

Ruddick’s design approach blurs the lines between ecology and art, leading to the creation of beautiful and sustainable places. As she says, “No matter how well you design a system, the most compelling factor in creating places that people will care for, tend, safeguard, and really live in is the way they feel and look, the way they function as places for living. So make bioswales, make pavement permeable, generate all of your energy off the grid but ultimately make beautiful places for people to love.”

With Wild by Design, Ruddick shows us how.

Margie Ruddick has crafted an innovative approach to design that brings together aspects of the landscape that seem to contrast—wild and urban, formally ordered and free, with attention to the messy margins where life happens. She has designed numerous high-profile projects including New York City's Queens Plaza, the Urban Garden Room at One Bryant Park, Shillim Institute and Retreat in India’s Western Ghats, and the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China. Elle Décor names Ruddick one of five landscape designers “who are reshaping our world,” and Dwell identifies her as a “Landscape Design Icon.” Ruddick has taught at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Yale, Princeton, Parsons School of Design, and more. She is principal of Margie Ruddick Landscape and winner of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in landscape architecture. www.margieruddick.com Wild by Design Paperback Original Publication Date: March 17, 2016 248 pages | Price: $45.00/ $44.99 (E-Book) ISBN: 978-1-61091-598-4/ 978-1-61091-599-1 www.islandpress.org/wild-by-design Founded in 1984, Island Press works to stimulate, shape, and communicate the information that is essential for solving environmental problems. Today, with more than 800 titles in print and some 40 new releases each year, it is the nation’s leading publisher of books on environmental issues. Island Press is driving change by moving ideas from the printed page to public discourse and practice.

Island Press’s emphasis is, and will continue to be, on transforming objective information into understanding and action. For more information and further updates be sure to visit www.islandpress.org. ###

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Biscayne Bay Garden, Miami Beach, Florida.

Credit: Margie Ruddick

Shillim Retreat and Institute, Maharashtra, India.

Credit: Writer Corporation

Publication date: March 17, 2016 978-1-61091-598-4

The graphic language of traffic striping, a Department of Transportation design, blends with the flow of the curbs, bike lane, and furnishings to create a design that has no boundaries. Queens Plaza, Long Island City, New York. Credit: Marpillero Pollak Architects

At points the desert plantings disappear, and the courtyard becomes a sculpture garden, including the mature Washi tree. Casa Finisterra, Baja, California. Credit: David Kelly

Living Water Park, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.

Credit: Jason Bregman

The Urban Garden Room, One Bryant Park, New York City.

Credit: Margie Ruddick

The seeming “naturalness” is the product of watching, weeding, moving, adjusting. Margie Ruddick home garden.

Credit: Margie Ruddick

For high-resolution images, a review copy, or to schedule an interview, please contact Jaime Jennings at 202-232-7933, ext. 44/jjennings@islandpress.org.