MLA student honored
as Olmsted scholar

Adam Nugent, a Master of Landscape Architecture student at Texas A&M, has been named a University Olmsted Scholar by the Landscape Architecture Foundation.

"His academic training, family background and his achievements in and beyond college have distinguished him as a special person," said Jon Rodiek, director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program, in a letter recommending Nugent for the prestigious honor. "In my 20 years serving as editor of a scientific journal, I have read work by authors who demonstrate insight based on multiple intelligences. These are the true scholars of the future. Rarely are these characteristics found in younger students. Adam Nugent has the markings of being one of them."

After earning a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy in 2004, Nugent enrolled in Princeton Theological Seminary.

"I grew dissatisfied with the foreseeable impact I might have pursuing an scholastic career in a small niche field," said Nugent in his scholarship application essay. "Though the study of ethics and the human condition was what in philosophy most intrigued me, and also what justified my turn from my earlier college pursuit of biology, I found that I was more interested in deciphering our just relationship to this world than in phantom promises or never-settled debates."

He left the seminary and joined the U.S. Army, graduating from officer candidate school as a second lieutenant.

"I joined the Army for many reasons — some of them lost to me now," he said. "All the honors of college dripped away in the sweat of Fort Jackson’s boot camp heat."

He graduated from officer candidate school as a second lieutenant, and was soon promoted to senior tactical director, planner and real-time controller of the 2-43 Air Defense Artillery Battalion.

His unit deployed in December 2007, and he spent the next 15 months conducting joint air operations with the Air Force and the Navy in three Middle East nations.

"I returned last April, having seen the Middle East’s stark contrasts of affluence and depravation: seismic impacts of oil, history, geography and conflict," he said.

He came to Texas A&M to pursue a Master of Landscape Architecture degree, getting back in touch with an activity he'd enjoyed since childhood: creating and expanding garden plots. When his family lived in South Dakota, he said, his parents set aside a small plot of land for him to grow various perennials and flowers.

"I fell so in love with the development, diversity and beauty of my little garden that, over the course of my high school years, I redesigned and expanded the small plot to encompass their entire property," he said.  "I filled it with flowering shrubs, fruit trees, patios, pathways and a meadow of perennials. It was my best attempt at Eden on the northern plains."

Nugent plans to continue his education with a focus on sustainable urbanism and transportation-oriented design.

"We must remove sustainable design from its niche and make it desirable, beautiful and necessary — to all development and redevelopment," he said. "The greatest gift that the landscape architecture profession brings to the table, beyond having a history of systems analysis and a long, ecological focus, is the ability to take the knowledge garnered from sociology, ecology, hydrology and myriad other disciplines, and blend them into functioning works of beauty."

The honor is named after Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, who designed Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City.

- Posted: Oct. 1, 2010 -

Contact:   Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.