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Nice article from Landscape Institute- congrats Andrew and Kevin!
Meet Andrew Spiering, founder of Land8Lounge
We speak to Andrew Spiering, the man behind the most successful social media site for landscape architects, about his mission to make the profession cool again…
Launched in March 2008 by Andrew Spiering and Kevin Gaughan, Land8Lounge is the web’s most successful social media site for landscape architects, boasting more than 10,000 members to date.
Spiering, who works for a small firm of Landscape Architects in south San Francisco, originally studied horticulture at California Poly, San Luis Obsipo, before becoming a landscape architect. What led him to set up Land8Lounge was a combined passion for design, landscape and a desire to connect people.
He saw an opportunity to invest in all of those passions by creating an online forum where landscape architects from anywhere in the world could come together to share ideas, portfolios and network.
Two years on, Spiering says Land8Lounge has “developed a life of its own”. The Gallery section, which gives members the option to post their work, is the main draw of the site at the moment, he believes. “It opens people’s minds to what’s going on internationally. There’s a lot of really talented designers posting inspiring work.”
While Land8Lounge requires a certain amount of daily behind-the-scenes administration, Spiering says both he and Gaughan find it a hugely useful application themselves – often being the first to comment on new work that’s posted or useful links, as well as using it day-to-day to make fresh contacts for their own work and to continue to promote landscape architecture.
Spiering says they are on a mission to “make landscape architecture cool again”. One of the ways of doing this is by driving awareness of the profession across social media platforms such as Land8Lounge, but also Facebook and Twitter. Land8Lounge has a growing Facebook membership and Spiering says this is an ideal way to reach out to non-landscape architects and get them excited about the profession.
“Facebook and Twitter allow us to tell people what landscape architects are doing in the world in which they live day-to-day. We can promote local projects that might be happening just round the corner from them that they wouldn’t otherwise know about. If we can tap into this we can see a change happen,” he says.
Spiering also sees social media as a way to build confidence in the profession from within. He and Gaughan are huge advocates of the work of organisations such as ASLA, the LI and IFLA, and often joke that “we’re the cheerleaders for landscape architecture”.
“We will do whatever we can to support these organisations; help them forge contacts and keep pushing the profession forward,” says Spiering.
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