Commercial Building Site/Grading Plans

I work for a civil firm. Andrew’s description is accurate, including the part about complaining about the need for an LA. That said, several of the larger LA firms prepare site plans and frequently team with civil firms over and over again. To answer your last question: I have not seen an LA stamp a grading and drainage plan/report, etc.

Interesting thought. There is overlap between the disciplines… but imho, no way an LA prepares civil CDs, reports, etc., for 99% of commercial projects, at least in my experience. Your clients won’t save anything by having the civil sub to an LA. I mark up my sub’s fees at least 10% to cover administering their contracts and paying them in a timely manner, preferably 15%. Vice versa can work: Civil firms without their own pet LA hire LAs to prepare commercial site plans / landscape plans so that the civils don’t get their brains wrapped around the axle.

One look at the landscape plan should tell you that the requirements are so simple that there is no reason to bring in anybody who specializing in the landscape if you are the developer. You always need a Certified Plot Plan for a building permit, so you have no choice other than needing a Professional Land Surveyor. You usually need a septic plan of some sort which is done by a Sanitarian which most CE’s have that endorsement. More often than not both these professionals work in the same office, or pair up professionally, or are the same person. It is one stop shopping. The developers start with who is required and don’t add more cooks in the soup unless absolutely necessary. If they start with an LA, they will have to get the other professionals whether they want them or not just because of stamping requirements – so they just don’t do that.

I’m an LA that works with CE/PLS on just about every project that I work on. It is custom residential work, so the need for a higher aesthetic than the CE is interested in doing is client driven. The last thing a CE or PLS wants to do is discuss plant choices with a trophy wife on her 6 million dollar summer home. I do what they don’t want to do and don’t have the experience, training, and disposition to do it.

My opinion is that your approach is 180 degrees from where it should be. It is not your fault. It is what we are all taught in school. You are focused on trying to do everything including what others are already doing. That means that you have to take work away from people who are more qualified and more established. You, or me, would be instantly disadvantaged with that approach and won’t get any help from the people who are already getting the work.

I learned that you if focus on what the people who are already very busy and successful are doing, you will be targeting an active market. I think you are already doing that. Your next step is not to try to do what the others are doing successfully. It should be to figure out what parts of their work that they really don’t want to deal with and see which parts you can do so that they don’t have to. If you can relieve them of stuff that you can do well and they really don’t want to do, they will refer you to their clients on every job that has those things. You won’t have to spend a dime on advertising and you’ll be busy.

Don’t chose a playing field that you can’t win on. Choose the place where you are the strongest. You’ll win every time.

When you try to take other people’s work, they won’t ever help you. When you make someone’s life easier, more profitable, or more efficient they will keep helping you. Never forget that.

I’m not saying it is true in every case. Your original post was about smaller scale commercial sites.

” It appears that it is very uncommon for an LA to do the site plan, grading plan, and drainage plan for a commerical site, is that true? I am talking about smaller-scale commercial, like a fast-food restaurant.”

I’m not saying that the developer does not value good site design at all. What I am saying is that typically regulations, including parking lot size defined by building SF factored by the type of use, drainage that is now often required to use retention areas rather than subsurface drainage structures which take up a lot of the space on a lot, landscape standards defined by regulation including buffers to lot lines, buffer to streets, parking lot plantings, and vegetating drainage retention areas is often extremely limiting. There is not a lot of room for high level design, so it really is not very difficult for a CE to design a seating area or a street planting.

Then you have to factor in that the developer is almost always going for highest and best use (HABU). They look to maximize the use on the site. They want the biggest building which is going to be limited by zoning setbacks, lot coverage % to start. Then it may be reduced because there is not enough room for the required parking spaces. Then the drainage calculations might result is a retention area that can’t fit on the lot, so the building gets reduced to reduce the parking to reduce the retention area to make it all fit. These are things the local engineer does all the time. Most landscape architects have a general knowledge, but they don’t eat, drink, and live in regulation land like the CE does.

When you add outdoor seating, you are often adding to the calculation for increased parking and runoff while using up more of the available area for parking or retention. If only the engineer can legally do the calculations and someone else is designing the outdoor spaces, it becomes a ping pong match going back and forth. The LA changes the hardscape and seating capacity and the engineer recalculates. The LA then has to adjust and send back to the CE. … and for only a simple flat seating area, some low maintenance foundation plants, street trees and some required buffer plantings that really doesn’t take significant training to design. Why would you go out of the way to add the complication?

The other thing that we as LAs overlook is that whether we like it or not these small CE firms doing small commercial projects have had to do this type of landscape design all the time for years. They are actually more experienced in small commercial landscape design that a lot of LAs because they do it all the time and we don’t.

Lastly, why the heck would a creative LA want to do small commercial landscape designs other than to fill a schedule and keep some money coming in? The is nothing more boring than that. It would be better to work for the CE doing site plans like I did. It was a great experience, but I’m glad to be done with it.

I’m not trying to be argumentative. I’m just trying to explain in detail what my observations were having sat on both sides of the situation. I hope it helps or at least gives you a different perspective from which you can draw your own conclusions.

Another thing regarding commercial sites with LAs. I did see several projects that most of the site was planned by the engineers with the details filled in by landscape architects. I was not involved in the site plans, but did have to prepare the survey crew’s data to stake local medium sized projects that were designed by bigger distant firms and needed local survey crew for onsite layout. That seemed like a good way of blending the design teams and not causing conflict. This was very evident with xeref drawing sets with over 100 dwg’s (ridiculous) – it made it easy to see how the work flow was divided.

An airport terminal and parking lot re-design is one that comes to mind and a large municipal recreation center with indoor and outdoor facilities is another off the top of my head.

I have not worked in a big firm, but what I seen is that the CE takes the drainage responsibility. They are all using software like hydrocad as an add on to Autocad. I don’t know that anyone is doing drainage calc’s the old fashioned way these days.

I don’t know ow many states allow LAs to do drainage calc’s. I know that Idaho did at least for a while, but I don’t know if any other state does.