Calico

I think it’s good to see some fresh ideas in the realm of playground design, even if the new ideas are coming from architects and involve foam blocks. Competition can be good. For too long, landscape architects have enjoyed a monopoly in playgrounds, and have squandered it by farming the design out to Kompan, Play Structures, and anybody else who…[Read more]

FYI, the link does not go to the thesis, at least for me. Cutting and pasting the URL into the address bar did the trick.
Interesting work from what I skimmed; see if you can pare it waaaaayyyy down (i.e., get rid of the fluff your committee had you include) and get published outside of academia. I can’t believe you transcribed each interview……[Read more]

Andrew, I think that there is a bit of a disconnect between what firms hiring entry level say that they want vs. the talent they actually acquire. Most firms hiring anybody advertise that they demand somebody fresh out of school who is a rock star in every category, from amazing design abilities to solid understanding of construction to…[Read more]

Your post is a good example of why professors don’t teach more AutoCAD in schools… given the steep learning curve, AutoCAD is difficult to teach, especially if your professors and GTAs have little or no real-world experience.
AJ Slater wrote an ebook that he shamelessly plugged mentioned several times in this space a while back. I have not read…[Read more]

As but a humble and detail-oriented technician – really nothing more than your lowly drafting slave who speaks only when spoken to, and then meekly before true designers – so obviously unable to see the importance of history, art and literature in my craft, I applaud your decision to escape the tyranny by taking the unlicensed high road.

If you are eligible and are capable of passing a test and can afford to do so, just get licensed; it should not be a problem unless you have test-taking anxiety issues and/or have not been exposed to or learned much in your first few years practicing. There have been at least a few crazy-bad horror stories about the awfulness of sitting for the…[Read more]

I always pack a nickel-plated .45 in a diamond-studded shoulder holster to match my glamorous cape and beret ensemble whenever I meet with civil engineers to avoid being dissed.

To answer your question from my experience, land developers and commercial builders sometimes hire landscape architects, planners, architects, and civil engineers to work for them as salaried employees. These folks oversee projects and act as an entitlement manager rather than do much design. Occasionally they will work up an in-house concept…[Read more]

To answer your question from my experience, land developers and commercial builders sometimes hire landscape architects, planners, architects, and civil engineers to work for them as salaried employees. These folks oversee projects and act as an entitlement manager rather than do much design. Occasionally they will work up an in-house concept…[Read more]

To take the landscapeplanner’s original post and flip it around, why should experienced professionals expect entry level designers to be anything but… well, entry level? They will need formal training in just about everything, and that training needs to be budgeted in their first two years. This $#@! ain’t cheap! If the firm refuses to provide…[Read more]

I don’t think you meant to reply to my rant. Oddly, with the exception the use of “CAD” of your last sentence, the post could have been written in 1963 just as easily as today. Now get back to work!!

Back in my day, we didn’t have AutoCAD, or any of these newfangled computer thingies! If we wanted to design something, we had to start by cobbling our base map together from USGS topo, lovingly interpolating each contour line by hand, use tape to draw property lines, templates for trees, and then redo everything from scratch when the owner…[Read more]

If you are concerned about your existing patio, do not put a fire pit on it. Locate the fire pit adjacent to the patio (preferably downhill and downwind from the patio), draining someplace that can filter wet soot, bbq grease, etc. A fire pit in the middle of a patio as seen on HGTV should be connected to a subsurface drainage system that…[Read more]

As indicated earlier I solved the problem at hand a while back. I tried to replicate the original problem and have not been able to replicate it. I suspect that a random acad error was the culprit, although the file seems to be clean. I did find a few different .lsp routines on line similar to what I described above… but not exactly. If I feel…[Read more]

If installed the other way wouldn’t you still face the same problem with this type of paver in any pattern other than running bond? Even in this close-up I can see a few tabs that were chipped off to force the pattern.

Again, I was able to solve the problem through the process of elimination and swearing (about 3 hours I won’t get back), and I did try something approximating your solution in the first paragraph. Those blocks were fine, so I knew that the problem was in an individual block and not global.
Thankfully, my blocks are not nested within other b…[Read more]

Thanks for the thoughts. I was able to brute-force a solution this morning similar to your approach above (perennials, trees, shrubs, etc., have unique layers), but need to figure out a lisp routine to get a solution more easily in the future. One &^%$* instance of one &^%$#^ block had a randomly huge z-value, which means that at some point I ei…[Read more]

Agreed. Dealerships can look decent without sacrificing program goals. My point was that every dealer I have worked for had to be peeled off the ceiling when informed that their municipality required landscape improvements as part of securing the building permit needed to upgrade the 1970’s showroom, citing the reasons described in Alan’s post above.

Take on some auto dealership work to learn exactly how much our profession is appreciated.

I have no idea where this project is, and am glad it’s not mine, but I run into this situation periodically when working for big-box clients from Arkansas who despise the notion of paying for construction administration, and then use my unstamped / unsigned NOT FOR CONSTRUCTION – FOR PLANNING APPROVAL ONLY drawings for… (wait for it)… bidding…[Read more]