Simon M. Bussiere, Candidate for CELA Second Vice President
Simon Bussiere is a registered Landscape Architect, Assistant Professor and the Acting Director and Graduate Chair of Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His studios and seminars focus on exploring ecological patterns and processes as the key drivers of urban, community and landscape form. He currently teaches courses in landscape architecture, environmental design and architecture programs, including urban ecological analysis and design and experimental modes of design representation. He contributes regularly as a writing and design reviewer for professional and academic organizations around the globe including CELA, DCA, NCBDS and ACSA. Simon is President of the Hawai‘i Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, an Editor at the European Landworks Cultural Association and Editor of Digital Media for the Design Communications Association. He is a Principal Investigator at the University of Hawai‘i Community Design Center, and holds visiting appointments at the University of Nagasaki in Japan, the University of Utah Asia Campus in South Korea, and is a member of the Global Track Faculty at Tongji University in Shanghai.
Bussiere earned his first professional degree in landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and later his post-professional graduate degree at Harvard University where he focused on international projects in landscape, architecture and urbanism. While at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard he designed projects in India, Brazil, Costa Rica, Sardinia and in Nicaragua, where he was awarded a GSD Studioworks selection and an International Community Service Fellowship from Harvard for his collaborative work in the peri-urban community of La Prusia, Nicaragua. His academic and professional experience spans the environmental design spectrum. He has taught 971 students in 29 different courses at 5 institutions since 2010. In practice at EDAW/AECOM in Melbourne Australia, Bussiere’s work included conceptual and schematic urban design for E-Gate, a multi-billion-dollar, 6,000-resident “ecodistrict”, along with a range of complex local and international work in corporate, leisure, real estate development, civic, utilities, and transportation market sectors. Simon was a member of the global AECOM design team that won first prize in the international design competition for Seoul Grand Park in 2009. Stemming from an arts, ecology and design/build background, with a diverse expertise in construction, conceptual design, visualization and community engagement, his work bridges ecological principles with contemporary design methods to help shape new environments around the globe. He is currently developing a research and design laboratory based in Honolulu to simulate and study dynamic environmental systems in the Hawaiian archipelago.
As Second Vice-President, Simon would work diligently to serve CELA and its membership, a supportive intellectual community that has continuously supported him over his academic career. He looks forward to forging new friendships and academic and professional connections and to working interscholastically across key issues that educators in landscape architecture are facing together in the 21st century. Standing in for the 1st Vice-President when needed, and serving as a member of the Board and the Executive Committee and Chair of the Standing Committee on Awards and Recognitions, Simon would bring a high level of energy and creativity into the fold. As a long-standing member of his current and previous school’s Scholarship and Awards Committees he brings a decade of experience in the value and significance of rewarding good work and is eager to contribute to the recognition of outstanding work on the national stage through CELA service. As Chair of the Standing Committee on Awards and Recognitions, he would continue CELA’s enduring commitment to advancing the field and those extraordinary individuals who espouse the highest levels of craft, skill and performance in the teaching of emerging landscape designers and in the leadership and creation of new knowledge that expands the boundaries of our collective imagination. He is willing and able to travel and meet regularly as needed to perform the duties of this office.