Forster Ndubisi: Finding Architecture’s Links Between Culture And Design
The college offers a rich, multifaceted environment, and his new department serves four distinct disciplines – landscape architecture, urban planning, land development and regional science.
At the end of his first semester as head of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University, Forster Ndubisi received two e-mails underscoring his primary reason for accepting the College of Architecture post a few years ago. Two graduate students from his department, the e-mails informed him, had recently earned highly competitive honors – one, a $7,500 fellowship from the Hideo Sasaki Foundation, and the other, a $20,000 dissertation grant from Active Living Research, a program sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“Awards on this caliber reflect the quality of our faculty, as well as the quality of our students,” noted Ndubisi, who previously served seven years as professor and director of the Interdisciplinary Design Institute at Washington State University- Spokane. “It takes good faculty to get these kinds of results, even if you have good students.”
The Texas A&M College of Architecture has an extraordinary faculty who together reflect the complexity and depth of the built environment disciplines, and Ndubisi is a good example. As a result, the college offers a rich, multifaceted environment, and his new department, with six degree programs serving four distinct disciplines – landscape architecture, urban planning, land development and regional science – “is almost like a college by itself,” he believes.
Prior to his job at WSU-Spokane, for nine years Ndubisi had a joint appointment at the University of Georgia. He taught at the School of Environmental Design, where he was tenured in 1992; and he served as city and regional planner for the Institute of Community and Area Development, where he conducted applied research and provided consultation services in design and growth management for Georgia communities.
With its academic diversity, A&M’s landscape architecture and urban planning department also facilitates Ndubisi’s desire to foster communication between design disciplines through collaborative projects and interdisciplinary teaching and research – a passion that has fueled his career.
A native of Nigeria, Ndubisi is the son of two schoolteachers who instilled in him a zeal for learning that paid off early on when he finished high school at the age of 16. His father, who earned a doctorate in education from Columbia University, also served as chairman of the education commission for the state of Anambra, in Nigeria.
“There are certain assumptions about design principles that are, in reality, culturally independent,” he explained. “That was what got me interested in the link between culture and design, and the design and planning implications of these differences.”
His growing interest in participatory planning and multidisciplinary problem solving led him in 1997 to accept the directorship of the newly established Interdisciplinary Design Institute at Washington State University-Spokane.
The Institute was created to foster collaborative learning, research and community service projects involving the four built environment disciplines taught at Washington State – architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and construction management.
His energy level is evidenced in his prolific scholarly output. In addition to numerous articles, paper and book chapters, Ndubisi has authored or co-authored three books. His latest, and perhaps most important book, “Ecological Planning: A Historical and Comparative Account” published in 2002 by Johns Hopkins University Press, has been widely acclaimed for its refreshing and innovative approach to the topics of land use planning and landscape architecture. Ndubisi’s work on ecological planning earned the only Honor Award in Research presented in 1999 by the American Society of Landscape Architects. In 2003, his book earned the Certificate of Merit Award from the ASLA’a Washington Chapter.
“I am very excited about the opportunity we have to build on the department’s diversity, and the strength and quality of our faculty and students,” he adds. “I want to maximize our competitiveness and position us as sustained leaders in all of our programs.”
