Bruce K Ferguson

Education and career

Ferguson earned the AB degree from Dartmouth College and the MLA (Master of Landscape Architecture) from the University of Pennsylvania in the department led by Ian L. McHarg. He practiced landscape architecture full-time for five years in the Pittsburgh area, and then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University while serving as Faculty Advisor in the United States Bureau of Mines Environmental Protection Division on amelioration of acid mine drainage from abandoned coal mines.

In 1982 he began teaching at the University of Georgia, where he eventually served as Director of the School of Environmental Design; he is now Franklin Professor of Landscape Architecture. In 2008 DesignIntelligence named him one of America’s 25 ‘Most Admired Instructors’ in all design fields. He has served as visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Tsinghua University in Beijing, and has lectured at Cornell, Berkeley, Harvard, and 20 other universities.

Ferguson has published 200 scientific and professional papers and four books. In 1991 he was awarded the Bradford Williams Medal for the year’s best-written article in Landscape Architecture.

Ferguson is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, a Past President of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, and a recipient of the Council’s Outstanding Educator Award, North America’s highest award for career contributions to landscape architectural education.

Influence

The environmental strength of McHarg’s Department of Landscape Architecture gave Ferguson a scientific background in the natural resource side of landscape architecture. At the same time, he states that Dartmouth’s broad liberal arts education enables him to communicate with professionals in different disciplines, to grasp the numerous types of demands that are placed on public design, to direct his research and design toward purposes useful to society at large, and to use whatever types of methods are necessary — mathematical, scientific, sociological, or artistic — to develop and recognize real solutions (1).

Ferguson’s work was instrumental in the ‘paradigm shift’ which linked urban design with healthy natural environmental processes, and enabled new technologies to do so at low cost (2). After the 1994 publication of his book Stormwater Infiltration and his paper on infiltration’s environmental importance (3), Harvard professor Robert France called Ferguson ‘the world’s expert in stormwater infiltration’ (4). In 2005 the publication of his book Porous Pavements was met by a review which called the book ‘a new Bible’ (5). Industry and professional associations in North America and overseas have employed him hundreds of times to introduce these new technologies and their applications to licensed design professionals and established construction contractors.

Ferguson has guided the ‘greening’ of new communities in Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico, and Alaska, and acted on interdisciplinary teams to guide new development in the metropolitan regions of Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. He has twice served as Faculty in Residence at Design Workshop, the firm which won ASLA’s 2008 Firm of the Year award, and continues to work with Design Workshop as a consultant on individual projects.

Since 2005 Ferguson has proposed unifying the environmental and people-oriented sides of urban design. He proposes a synthesis of urban ecology and human community, based on the universal concept of open dynamic systems. A potential implication is the development of a unified system of criteria for urban design that builds healthy, mutually reinforcing environmental and human systems simultaneously (6).

Books

• Porous Pavements, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8493-2670-7 • Introduction to Stormwater: Concept, Purpose, Design, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998, ISBN 978-0-471-16528-6 • Stormwater Infiltration, Boca Raton: Lewis Publishers, 1994, ISBN 0-87371-987-5