[Christine Piwonka-Bernstein]

I can’t believe that working for a registered LA in an “unlicensed multidisciplinary firm” doesn’t count!  That is just crazy and I don’t see anything in their regs that would make anyone think they would be able to do this. I’m all in favor of protecting the profession, but not from itself. 

 

The fact is, engineers and architects have enough overlap to be able to approve almost anything that a landscape architect can do, and there a a whole bunch of “landscape designers” who can do a better job with planting plans and small-scale design than many LA’s can, but landscape architects don’t seem to lobby hard enough for getting themselves appropriate credit or recognition. In a lot of towns’ site plan and subdivision regulations I have seen, plans must be prepared by architects, engineers and surveyors, but landscape architects cannot have final sign-off on plans (OK, I understand that you always need a surveyor for a subdivision, which is cool with me – they work hard in miserable conditions….), even though LAs are often very well equipped for much of this work.

 

I worked on stormwater plans, doing calculations for pipe sizes, and outfall and risers for ponds. At one point years ago, I spoke to the people at the office of the professions and was scolded for doing these calcs – told I was not allowed to do them. Well, in the office I worked in, we all did them, even undergrad interns – obviously the PE project engineer looked at them before stamping the work, but I thought it was kind of short-sighted to be told that I wasn’t allowed to work on it.  As a landscape architect, it helps to realize that yes, a stormwater pond or swale will inevitably need to be 5 times bigger than you expected, it won’t be able to work on a slope with a 10% grade, and that the outfall structure is going to be huge and ugly if you don’t think about it first. But we collaborated with many landscape architects who really had no concept of this, and got really upset when we had to alter their plans to come close to meeting stormwater standards.

 

As for school, I reach all 12 credits based on academics alone, because I have another masters in planning… I’m still supposed to get 2 years minimum professional credit. Fine, I’ll work with that.

 

I wrote to find out about getting a refund of my application fee – I think it was $275 when I applied. I can get a refund of $155. It would have been nice for them to tell me when I had applied that there was no chance of them ever letting me take the exam so that I could have saved my money and spent it on something useful like the LEED exam or a set of garden tools to start my own landscaping/garden design enterprise.

 

Anyway, Happy Holidays!

Chris

[Christine Piwonka-Bernstein]

I use inkscape for some graphics, and am looking in to GRASS for gis.

[Christine Piwonka-Bernstein]

It doesn’t really seem like NY has a provision for an experience waiver, either.   O_o   I wouldn’t mind taking the sections C & E, if they would let me, and then just sit on my hands and wait for the actual license – I think it would make my resume a little stronger when I am applying for jobs, because the potential future employer would see that they wouldn’t need to subsidize my exam, either as an outright expense or as a time sink (that is assuming I would pass… even if I didn’t pass, I think it would be a great experience to have had a shot at it while I am unemployed, sort of to keep my mind sharp and to know what I was getting into for a second time around).

 

One of the biggest frustrations is that when I showed my work to the LA who I had worked for briefly, he said (and I paraphrase) “Wow! This is great experience – you’d never have gotten to work on these kinds of things if you’d stayed with me. Landscape architects really need to know how to do this stuff…”

 

Oh well.

[Christine Piwonka-Bernstein]

One thing I did that seemed to help was to re-draw a whole lot of details by hand, taking them from various sources (time saver standards, graphic standards, some stormwater treatment details from work and different states’ regs, online army corps/BLM details, etc.). I sort of thought them through during the drawing process, and would double-check different references if something seemed unclear or counterintuitive. I did them all in a nice little hardbound sketchbook, so now I have an easy reference of details that pretty much make sense to me.

Even though I took the test a while back, I still add to this sketchbook pretty regularly, and when I am trying to work out site-specific details.

[Christine Piwonka-Bernstein]

no

[Author]

Posts