Andrew Garulay, RLA

Good call, Jon. 
His family continues to carve Crazy Horse at 10x the size of the Rushmore sculptures. If you’ve been to either place, they have a lot about him and the family. … I bet Tanya knows the details well.
 
SoDak is the US’s best kept secret. Rushmore, Crazy Horse, the Badlands, and Custer State Park should be on everyone’s bucket list.

Perhaps it is the success of a well created piece of nature that makes one disassociate people from it. A building is so man made that it makes people think “who made this”. An outdoor space, even if built of hardscapes and line along with plants just feels  much less associated with a human creator.
 
People tend to view a park as land that wa…[Read more]

Here is the deal as I see it. This is a diverse profession folks. There are a lot of career paths within it and a lot of different ways to get to various points along that path.
Lorna is quite clear about her path – to return to work as a licensed LA in her family’s business. I know several people with LA degrees who went into business prior to…[Read more]

I had an interesting conversation with an engineer/surveyor principal regarding landscape architecture fees today. He actually wrote a guide and conducted a seminar for a surveying professional organization about fee structures for surveyors, so I regard his knowledge in this even though he is not an LA. He discussed with me the general approach…[Read more]

The only major city with real estate value going up…. barely.
http://www.azcentral.com/business/realestate/articles/2011/03/29/20110329biz-home-price-index0329.html
 
Is there a ton of LA jobs there? I doubt it, but growth in LA jobs tends to generally follow rising/falling real eastate values.  

If you can’t get intern time, set yourself up to have an advantage over others when the jobs to become open to hoards of people waiting to fill them.
 
Many are going to be spending this time getting LEED accredited, or working for landscapers, nurseries, or graphic art related jobs. … those “extras” are going to be a dime a dozen in my…[Read more]

Washington, DC
 

“As you can see from what is happening in California, with our new governor Jerry Brown, the taxpayer is represented through the electoral process, in negotiation with unions.”
 
That is what happened in Wisconsin, but it went the other way. Sometimes it swings left and sometimes it swings right….. and the farther a pendulum swings from the c…[Read more]

No one should be stamping other people’s work, but being hired as a consultant to work together is pretty normal. You should write up a contract that protects your liability and also reserves some rights for you to use your participation and photographs of the project for advertisement or other uses.

There are some seriously messed up posts on this thread.

I do full site plans including driveways, swimming pools (grading and retaining walls with spot elevations), patios , fencing, …and most anything else that you might find on a residential house lot for under $2k. I don’t provide construction details and specifications with it, but they are all custom designed for the client and site. It will be…[Read more]

? How do you get that from what I just wrote? Two questions – one asking why Tanya is alone on this and another asking whether there are a lot of women in the profession out there.
 
… followed by an explanation that women do participate, are expected to participate, and lead where I live …and no one is taken aback by it.
 
Why do you want t…[Read more]

Are there any women owned LA firms out there? Where are the rest of the women in your state on this? Women are very well represented in my state and in my area.I don’t even belong to ASLA or BSLA and women are highly visible in LA work. They are also well represented and hold offices in the regional Landscape Contractor’s Association. Unlicensed…[Read more]

We are required to have bioswales/rain gardens/bioretention areas in commercial projects in certain jurisdictions and you are correct that there is a gap between old engineering practices and current requirements. It may be something that is well covered currently in landscape architecture education and maybe also in stormwater management in…[Read more]

The unfortunate thing is that they define competent as being adequately addressing the written performance standard of an ordinance rather than the many other things that go into what we all consider standards for adequacy.
One would think that if they declare the need to have an LA it would be to adopt the standard that the profession brings with…[Read more]

I work on civil site plans way more than landscape plans and I also research and draw lots of recorded survey plans as well. I don’t recall seeing too many North arrows pointing right.
 
I’ve seen a lot of Massaachusetts Highway Plans with north arrows actually pointing toward the bottom of the page. They used long sheets of paper and ran the r…[Read more]

I did a search on google. I found a city engineering standard that said “straight up”or “to the right” (small city in Washington State – I lived in that area and never heard of that city). I don’t think I’ve seen that as a standard in my area.
It is, as some others have said, how it best fits on the sheet with an effort to have North up.

As said by others, North is generally upward, preferably straight up. I think that the convention that you are associating is that when a plan is “sideways” within a plan set, it should be oriented so that the bottom is to the right. The binding should either be to the left or on top so that you can turn the pages in a “normal” way like a book or…[Read more]

When was the last time you saw a yew in a nursery which had seeds on it?

Curious to know what the issue is with Taxus baccata.  …not the berry thing, is it?
 
I may have written more than necessary, as usual, above. We have one zoning district that requires an LA stamp. We do have some exclusive communities that have architectural review committees which also have landscape requirements. In each case they state t…[Read more]