MAN WITH A PLAN PETER BIGELOW’S CAREER AS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT DEEPLY ROOTED IN AN ACADIA EXPERIENCE RICH IN ORIGINAL THINKING By Laura Churchill Duke (’98)
Peter Bigelow (‘83)
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ACADIA BULLETIN Fall 2016
PHOTO: COURTESY OF PETER BIGELOW
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eter Bigelow (’83) has had a wonderful career making big plans, but maybe the best plan of all was when he decided to attend Acadia University. “Acadia helps to grow your mind,” he says, attributing much of his success to his favourite professors: Dr. George Curry in plant physiology and Dr. Jim Stokesbury in history. “They really instilled the idea of looking at root causes, whether in science or history,” Bigelow says. “They encouraged original thinking.” That kind of thing quickly came in handy. Before he graduated with a BSc in biology, Bigelow had a summer job as a streetscape installer in his hometown of Truro. He loved it so much he knew he wanted to do this type of work for the rest of his life. Thus, the illustrious career of a landscape architect began. “Being a landscape architect is far more than designing parks and planting bushes,” Bigelow explains. It’s really about designing environments that take into consideration human ecology – the relationship between humans and their natural, social and built environments – and our natural ecology. “Not everything we design can be based on human rules,” he says. For the past 27 years, Bigelow has worked with the City of Halifax as a landscape architect. When he began, he was the first landscape architect to be hired so he was able to shape his own job. He started work on planning and building Halifax’s park system and moved on to regional and city planning.