Are you working or not ?

[Mary Weber]

You bet.

[Boilerplater]

Might be interesting to find out what they are up to now. I imagine the developers have gone to China and Abu Dhabi and the lawyers are now doing bankruptcy and foreclosures.

[alland]

No. 2 years……..ASLA is deliberatey in the dark..any kind of special article on this catastrophic effect on all design professionals? No. High faluten projects out of touch with typical LA work and LAs themselves? and contests for best designs? Plenty.

[Andrew Garulay, RLA]

They are like government and academia, it is about growth of students and membership and the money that comes with it. You have to attract students and members. You can’t do that if you say there is no job when you get out. They excited a lot of environmentalists to get LA degrees and join ASLA by making them think the profession is something other than designing development – the goose that lays the golden eggs no matter what you do. No development = no work. No development = no funding mechanism for “progressive infrastructure”, mitigation projects, or restoration projects. The goose is not laying well these days. Whatever we want to do in our careers, we need to revive the goose to make it happen.

[John J Dempsey]

yes

[Bryan Bailey]

Yes, but most all our recent projects are dead or went on hold.

[Albert C]

Yes

[Tanya Olson]

So the elephant in the room is “What do we do about it?” How sacred of a cow is ASLA? Are professional membership organizations obsolete? It a network like this sustainable in the long term? Is this too hot of an item to post as its own thread?

It would be interesting to ask any of the LAs involved the Designed Landscape Forum which I understood to be an alternative to the ASLA conference….although I also had the feeling it was the offspring of the Harvard – Berkeley schools of Landscape Architecture. Walker, Schwartz, Hargreaves, Van Valkenburgh, Mary Margaret-Jones, etc.

From the Spacemaker Press book which was a result of the first Designed Landscape Forum (nov. 1996) “…the Designed Landscape Forum recognized that there are few opportunities for design-oriented professionals to exchange ideas and review the work of their colleagues in the same or similar fields.”
Did anyone else attend that conference?

[Andrew Garulay, RLA]

They will come around because the question will no longer be about recruiting new members. It will be about keeping those that they have. I think they’ll be a little slow coming around because of the identity crisis that I think they have. They need to remember that development is what makes all of the “good things” possible.

[Carolina Irani]

NO.

[landplanner]

Let’s keep the commentary rolling in here, I will take down the discussion log in two weeks and post a summary of what everyone had to say, the completely unreliable ratio of those employed versus not, and some thoughts about what proactive things we can do to help each other and our profession out in this regard.

[Jill Van Sickle]

Unemployed since October 2008. Moved from SD to North L.A. area with a couple leads, but they fell through due to a hiring freeze. I’ve been doing a few freelance projects. Have been trying to keep up, technologically speaking. So, I’ve been out of work for almost a year and a half.

[Carolina Irani]

To be more specific, I live in Chicago and have been out of work almost 13 months now-decided to start my own business 6 months ago but no major work yet. Definitely no residential, a few green roof leads but that’s really it.

[Tatiana Šuláková]

YES*

[Sigrid Pichler]

YES*

[Author]

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