5 Landscape Architecture Things

I wish they had more emphasis on:

1. the diversity of opportunities there are to apply the knowledge, skills, and abilities one acquires with the education.

2. that strengths in some areas can overcome weakness in others.

3. that less is sometimes more. (rather than giving the impression that more deliverables, more management, higher end graphics, …. always give an advantage)

“…any design idea is ‘automatically’ good and not questioned regarding practicality.”

Is what you cite more a characteristic of high budget top visibility (sort of corporate image etc.) type work versus mid-range type? Or committees doing the approvals and waving something on to the next stage of details, not seasoned real estate and construction-savy type clients?

This may not be the place to attach a related concern of my own but here goes: the growing assumption that since we now have great 3D and rendering software…that a great-looking rendering proves the viability of a design. I’ve seen some that almost hurt when I try and imagine walking through them (huge expanses of unrelieved pavement in very hot environments etc.) and almost feel sorry for users, therefore the clients who get amazed by the visualizations and have trouble grasping how they will play out in reality. That in turn pulls designers themselves in the direction of “effects” over practicality.

IMO….”NO, any design idea is NOT automatically good and not questioned regarding practicality”.

My thinking here is that our Landscape Architecture Professors and the many Landscape Architects (senior to us) throughout out design careers…help us determine “good design from poor design”…there is a difference! Of course “good design” has its’ grey areas, because, there are very talented Landscape Architects and many who are still learning.
IMO, there is nothing “automatic” about any type of design.

Yes, every design must have a “purpose”, but, I have always had a philosophy that every design project must be “both creative, well designed as well as have strong graphic presentation”, that you can’t have one without the other”.

I have seen some well designed projects where the drawings were just very poorly drawn. And, I have seen exceptional presentation projects, 2D and 3D, where the graphic presentations were terrible! That’s where I think too many LAs drop the ball.

Once you have created a well designed project…then, it needs to become a strong black and white or color presentation.

Lets be real. Employers require degrees because they’re lazy. It’s a fast way to weed people out. I know tons of people that graduate with no billable skills. If they learned anything practical it was from internships. Working for free would be much efficient than paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a worthless degree

There is a lot to unpack here and the only way to is to start at the beginning. For context, understand that I have come into this field after retiring from a career in the Military. So while I just graduated from an accredited design school, I am not some kid living in my parents basement. More on that later as it regards to the GI Bill.

This The list that started this off is in part covered by some of the Professional Practice, perhaps not the level of detail that you you might hope, but the introduction is there. While it is an introduction I believe that the emphasis is a little too far over the heads of most students. As an example, The last assignment for my Pro Practice class was drafting a proposal to a city for a park, acting as a principal. As all you well know, a proposal is a fairly complicated document, and not something that is going to be handed to an entry level designer. It is one thing to understand the concept, but another thing entirely to spend half a term building.

Other things that were pointed out, at my school, the emphasis on the diversity of scale seemed to be a emphasized. This idea lends itself to be adapted to the diversity in the field, which was talked about repeatedly. The capstone projects were expected to demonstrate a students ability to work at a variety of scales on the same project, while also encouraging students to work at the overall scale that interested them. In my case, I had a 2 acre historic cemetery that was rather detail heavy and site focused, but nested well into the local context. Another student took on the waterfront in Green Bay, WI that was more at the planning scale and required less site details because of the immense scope.

While a university education is not supposed to be trade school, a professional degree program unfortunately is. much of the time spent in a 5 year program is learning the skills required to be able to work in an office, with much of the emphasis on digital media and being able to articulate ideas and concepts visually, verbally and written. On top of the practical application of graphics and presentation, landscape theory is also pushed. so at the end of it all, there is a lot of information crammed into a short five years. While I have been given a lot of information, I am not sure what to do with all of it, yet. I understand that information will eventually become knowledge as I practice and this is true for any field.

Practicality versus Creative Development – My first couple studios I was found to have a propencity to wards seeing the problems on a site and offering a realistic solution. This school’s curve is to have the students create ridiculous concepts early to foster creativity and refine that over time towards more practical solutions by the time of the capstone. One of my instructors commented on it and this stuck. She noted that while my approach solution was completely doable that I would be doing this kind of soul-crushing work for the rest of my career and that it was OK to “Go nuts” in design school and create things that have no possibility of ever being built. I did the opposite of the curve in that I went from practical to ridiculous, and in doing so was able at the end to present a ridiculous idea in a practical manner. So much so that my solution is being implemented on the site that I studied.

Lastly, I have to call out some inaccuracies of what has been stated. Robert, there have been a lot of changes in the GI Bill in century that has past since you were in school. In today’s reality, the GI Bill covers three years of university education, with the idea that MOS training and 4 years of service waives the freshman year. An accredited Architecture School professional degree takes 5 years to complete and is on a prescribed schedule, meaning that there is no real “freshman” year. Three years is covered, but not the last two. Most Veterans cannot afford the extra two years, therefore choosing not to pursue the field. The only reason I was able to complete my program was because I qualified for vocational rehabilitation, without which I could not have afforded to return to school despite the fact that I draw a decent retirement and disability income from my service. This is why you are seeing fewer Veterans in the design fields.

Sorry for the book, but there was lot to unpack here.

Wouldn’t it be more usefull to share you extensive experience than just picking on what others say?

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by Alexandru Gheorghe.