[Nick Schmidt AICP, PMP]

My land8 profile has a link to my LinkedIn page. My LinkedIn page has a link to my personal website. Perhaps you should do a little more homework on me and my personal experience (all of which is described in detail) before attacking my initial post.

[Nick Schmidt AICP, PMP]

I’m not a landscape architect and I don’t have a landscape architect license. I don’t have a BLA or an MLA. Who the hell cares?

As a planner I did landscape plan reviews for several municipalities a decade ago (and I started at age 24). I remember at least 2 or 3 landscape architects who ran independent practices. Their work was filled with errors over multiple sites over multiple municipalities. They were constantly hired by different clients despite the awful work.

Typical Planting Plan Errors by “Older” Landscape Architects (insert sarcasm here)
(based on personal review of ~650 planting plans for 13 municipalities over 4 years of all age groups)
1. Plant unit tables drawn by hand but not checked with a calculator. Incorrect plant unit tabulations for bufferyard landscaping, foundation landscaping, parking island landscaping, and woody plantings along a stormwater high water line.
2. Beautiful colored hand renderings of 5 different types of parkway tree symbols (in 5 colors) but the plant species table listed them as a single tree species (Acer rubrum or red maple).
3. Same as #2 but the tree species is Acer japonicum (Japenese maple which is not used as a parkway tree)
4. Large 8′-10′ existing heritage trees in the middle of a property where the building will be built. These are not identified in the Tree Preservation Plan and there is no provision for replacement costs in the petitioned plans).
5. Trash enclosures have 8′ barbed wire fences (ouch).

Yeah, I guess I don’t know a thing about landscape design being a 38 year old land planner.

[Nick Schmidt AICP, PMP]

nickrschmidt.com.

There are about 40 projects on there for your viewing and critiques. I have a much larger project catalog of 100-150 projects that are not on the internet but they are carefully documented and explained and are kept as files of record.

As for my work history:
I have worked for 5 different employers since 2005, not 9. I was also laid off 4 times in 8 years in 3 states due to lack of work, several of the layoffs occurred during the Great Recession and the last one was due to lack of work as a result of Hurricane Harvey. You have a lot of nerve attacking my work history, especially when these were circumstances beyond my control.

Since 2003, I have worked on 150-175 projects in 3 states. I am one of the few planners who are both AICP and PMP credentialed, and I am 5 years away from earning an FAICP designation. I run my own free lance graphics firm on the side, WorkSMART Graphics which I started in 2017 which largely focuses on non-planning work to avoid conflicts of interest. On top of that I am looking into pursuing a graduate degree part time related to land development starting in 2021, either an MSRED, MBA, or a Masters in Finance with a real estate specialization while I continue to work full time in planning. I am not some stupid, ignorant idiot who has had 15 jobs.

Now, back to the meat of the argument.
What does my personal work history have to do with identifying poor quality work from the older generation? As a PMP, I am a huge proponent of quality management and continuous improvement. If I see BAD work it is BAD work. It doesn’t matter if it done by someone in college or someone 5 decades out of college. It is BAD work. And there are plenty of older people who have gotten by with BAD work in their career. That’s why I responded to this post. I targeted older practitioners because poor quality work can be found at any age group and at any level of experience. It’s ALL of our responsibility to identify poor quality work. If I did a bad job producing a plan and a junior designer told me the error, I would take it seriously and make the change. I would even thank the person who told me the error because it makes the overall product better for the client (or averted a bigger series of problems for the project site if it went unnoticed). Who cares if I had 15 years or 45 years or 1 year of experience? If I can make a well-constructed, objective, impartial argument free of personal bias, then I should make that argument.

Last but not least.
Most licenses and certifications (engineering, architecture, landscape architecture, planning, surveying) have a Code of Ethics, and they usually say it is our PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY to identify errors on plans, or something to that effect. I have been AICP since I was 27 (and I was also an APA ethics officer for a few years) and I have been identifying problems on drawings by others since Day 1 (planers, engineers, surveyors, landscape architects, architects). All members on a project team should do a quality check throughout the project life cycle.

[Nick Schmidt AICP, PMP]

Why are there some older landscape architects not drawing with a scale? Not drawing to design regulations? Not drawing with regards to topography?

Why are the clients still going to these firms, and why do I have to spend countless hours cleaning up the designs?

I am planner who designs subdivisions but I have worked alongside LAs for 15 years. The same rules apply to park design, planting plans, design build, etc. I am TIRED of bowing down to the EQUALLY…TERRIBLE…work coming from HIGHER up the food chain. Rework costs the client money. It’s lose/lose having to correct a 65 year old’s hand rendered site design with 1′ sidewalks, 5′ overstory trees, 2′ landscape buffers, 7′ two-way driveways. To make matters worse, the back of the commercial building pad is not drawn along the correct elevation line, so now part of the building is in the floodplain.

I guess that old school landscape architect used some snazzy Chartpak, Prismacolor, and Tria markers, touched it up with accents of soft pastels and some “architect” line type to get the client buy-in. But when it came time to making the actual site WORK beyond the pretty picture, the CAD drawing didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be engineered and it was overpromised, either in terms of gross leasable area or numbers of dwelling units. Now, the CAD drawing is sent over to my desk at another firm, and I have to get the same number of lots or square feet but with a smaller developable area.

How did these older people, who are quite terrible in site design, landscape architecture, etc.stay in the profession OVER 4,5,6 DECADES…and get away with it?

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