Calico

Agreed on the dicey thing. Several of our land development clients (domestic, not international) put their projects on hold following the election. Should be an interesting few years.

Among other things, neighborhood design is what I do. I tend to agree with your boss: it’s tough to find folks able to lay out a neighborhood anybody might want to live in, although many firms advertise the service. I don’t think the subject is emphasized as much as it once was in LA programs.

Regarding software… I did see an Autocad 3rd party…[Read more]

Why stop at a measly five to seven years and only three mentoring LAs? Why not go for ten years and five mentoring LAs?

If you are using LT, you are basically grading by hand on paper, scanning your design for use as a reference, and then refining your sketched contours while digitizing. If your contract docs are prepared with a 1′ contour interval at 1″ = 20′, prepare your draft at a 5′ interval at 1″ = 50′ to save time and not get hung up on too many details. All…[Read more]

In a feeble attempt to return the discussion to its original focus, the primer I used was Theodore Walker’s Planting Design (1991). It was geared toward landscape architects, but would be very straightforward for an instructor teaching motivated non-designers. The only real drawback a couple of decades later is that the illustrations and drawings…[Read more]

Hmm…. normally when I get to PS, design is pretty much complete, so maybe i’m missing something. Moving stuff around in P’S means I have to repeat the feat in Acad when going past planning level… and I have to keep track of more moving parts. Creating a separate PDF for each type of entity (canopy trees, evg trees, bldgs, cars, etc.) is not…[Read more]

I use Photoshop for renderings. Here are my two cents that might save you some time.

1. Save your working file with the .psd extension. Creating the .pdf extension directly from within Photoshop is unstable on larger projects, leading to errors, data loss, huge file sizes and overall anarchy.
2. Confirm that you really need 300 dpi, especially if you…

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Agreed that there will be more than just completing the degree. The combined vows of poverty, stability, chastity, and obedience during the apprenticeship period are tough, particularly when facing student debt.

Since you took the time to bump your discussion after receiving no response, I will take the time to tell you that my library is proprietary.

It’s a broad profession. Your honest response is pretty common, even among students who are graduating (and probably more than a few professionals as well). Depending on where you live, you may have a community college nearby that offers some kind of intro to landscape design course or two, or even a full-blown associate’s degree in landscape…[Read more]

Get the MLA. It’s a less time in school and gives you a master’s degree. Also, getting a second undergraduate degree cheapens your first undergraduate degree IMHO. I have no idea of your financial situation, but taking on a ton of debt to go after a low paying but still scarce LA design job out of school sounds wrong. But who am I to judge? Good luck!

Reuse and recycle.

When I actually get to practice landscape architecture, it’s pretty easy. That said, I need a new tool – right now I’m thinking that a 40,000V cattle prod might do the trick – that magically encourages small-town surveyors who evidently face no competition to use those handy little thingies in AutoCAD called “layers,” while at the same time does…[Read more]

Glad I could provide irony. Remember: Fluff kills. Good luck

I can’t get past “cracking out”. Whether a typo or intentional, I’ve already used it on this call that won’t end. Thanks

Creating a TIN from that many contours would take quite a while… and the end result would likely be too big to be of much use in most models. If I was doing your project, I’d probably start by erasing about 90% of the contours, importing again to a new file, and seeing if the remainder looks reasonably close. Fewer 3D faces is the key to…[Read more]

Just remember to set up each project file a little bit differently from the next so that you are the only person who can possibly navigate them, thereby ensuring at least a few extra days on every project for your teammates to identify and solve archaic AutoCAD problems. I swear that’s what our surveyors and civils do.

Everybody has made valid points regarding unnecessary ornamentation vs. needed function next to a highway (although basing the level of detail on speed should mean in my twisted world that the 405 anywhere near LAX should resemble Versailles more than a DMZ). Unfortunately, places immediately adjacent to highways tend to lack any function -…[Read more]

Bizarro world? Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit dropping acid. But I digress.
The vast majority of play structures I see are privately owned and operated, although we do have some decent publicly owned parks here in Flyover Nation. The play structures, for the most part, all look the same, much like the sterile breeding box neighborhoods…[Read more]

Not necessarily lazy and thoughtless and inopportunistic, although that describes a few LA firms in the greater Denver area that relied heavily on national production builder clients to exist and thought the gravy train would go forever. It’s simply much more profitable for said LA firms to farm the playground design out to somebody else in…[Read more]