David Cristiani

I’m not saying one thing or another about nerds. What I’m saying is about us. I believe that most of us know our client’s needs and address them and never bother categorizing them as nerds or anything else. If we do what we are supposedly trained to do, it all processes out. There is no need to have a contingency plan for nerds or anyone else if…[Read more]

We used to list “activities-experience-requirements” (AER) in school. What are the activities that nerds have? What are the experiences that they want to derive while having those activites? What are the physical requirements necessary to make thaose happen?
I don’t list those out like I did in school, but I process them just the same whether I’m…[Read more]

I’m a big believer in low overhead when you are starting out. I’m not as big a believer that such a website needs to have as many bells and whistles. I have used a cheap template web hosting which costs me about $100 a year – Lycos Tripod. I’m fully in control of it. While it might not be a great web site, that is because of me – I seldom update…[Read more]

This original post is two years old according to the date on it.

Maybe they fired the HR person and got a new one. Apply again!

Why not?

It is under “People Skills” in Landplanner’s post. I  liked that one, too.

As with any good design, when the specific criteria needed to make it function is matched with the site it will be good. When a concept is imposed uniformly it becomes a box of chocolates as Forest Gump’s momma would say.
Some animals need this more than others and some highways need this more than others. Where there is density of large mamals…[Read more]

Commercial is slow here with the notable exceptions being car dealerships, banks, insurance companies, super markets (to some extent), and medical offices. Higher end residential is still quite viable if you enable others to hold on to at least some of the project management – people who work in investment firms, banking, and business co…[Read more]

Make no mistake, landscape architecture is and always has been a response to the needs of someone or somne people spending money to accomplish building something on the land. Whether they are nerds, mountain climbers, or porn stars, our work and what we need to be prepared to do follows what those spending money on developing or re-developing land…[Read more]

I think it has always been on a  “on a need basis only”. That is what made the explosion of landscape architecture jobs that generated the “20% expansion by the year 2018” statistic that was and maybe still is on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website.
 
That trend of growth obviously did not continue and we look back and see that it was not r…[Read more]

There are a lot of ways to speculate on motivation of both the employer and potential employee here. The thing is that we all have a choice to take on he job or not.
 
Some businesses are struggling and have to do everything they can to maintain their last few employees. I don’t know what the state of that company is, but it is not beyond…[Read more]

I’m comforted by the notion, which may reside only in my own head and no where else, that those whom are likely to hire either an architect or landscape architect DO know what each is, thus there is no benefit to us for the rest of the population to know. I take it one step further to believe that we will be more burdened with dead end leads s…[Read more]

I wonder if a BLA would not be better both to give you the foundation to learn on and I’m not so sure that it won’t better prepare you to do wht you want to do. The words “Master’s Degree” seem to be a major sales ploy in universities these days. Some are phasing out having undergrad LA degrees accredited in order to keep students in school longer…[Read more]

The problem is managing the help and the costs associated with it. Labor issues, labor issues, labor issues. Then the overhead forces you to keep work coming in even when it is lesser work than you intend to do. Then the referals are for more and more lower end stuff and that is what you become, if you are not careful.
 
Getting in on good t…[Read more]

My nephew is a contributing author to a new book on legal issues with social media for what it is worth … shameless plug for a relative:
http://socialmediatoday.com/eric-garulay/561764/social-media-legal-tips-trademark-protections-brandjacking-and-cybersquatting

Let’s not overlook whether it was necessary to provide such a detail in the first place. We learn that this is what LAs do while we are in school. Sometimes it is exactly what you should not do. I don’t know which was the case here, but we should be aware of this.
 
If the design is sold as a separate service so that a client can either accept…[Read more]

A design is not necessarilly owned by those who pay for it. The rights to use it for the particular project is their’s, but if stated in the contract and/or on the document(s), it can not be continually used on other projects. This is very commonly written on architects plans and is a subject covered in the standard AIA Appendix (look in the back…[Read more]

Maybe we are in a habit of looking at the profession from the inside out and from the government down? Too many other professions and academia seem to have something to lose by making it a recognised profession.
 
Well, if the profession has value, which I believe it does, it makes more sense to go to those who value it or who will value it in…[Read more]

Do a google search on “copyright”. I think you’ll find that it is easier to protect than you might think.

So, what is it that we hated about the “old normal” that makes people want to accept this “new normal”?

At some point it should become clear that the “old normal” was the best thing on the planet and in the history of the world.