Tanya Olson

The latest – green or natural cemetaries. I found tons of information and books on cemetaries, burial landscapes, and cemetary design in the past when I searched….try Amazon.com and search ‘cemetary design’. Best of luck! One of my studio-mates did her thesis on cemetaries and used the mound-building native cultures of our area as a precident…[Read more]

For an American, I would think China would be a better fit than other SE Asian countries culturally speaking. Shanghai! That would be so cool! Personally, I would consider the risks vs the benefits, which I’m sure you have, but as I see it some are:
1. The LA job market isn’t going to come roaring back in the next 6 months while you’re gone. I do…[Read more]

Ha! Clearly you’ve never dealt with MN winter snow removal! MN winters are the reason my southern friends who toyed briefly with living in the north country fled back to south as soon as possible! haha!
I feel compelled to explain this northern practice……My understanding is that the sidewalks are (or were) heated as a byproduct of the…[Read more]

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a great read on this exact subject. In it he writes about why people believe what they believe, buy what they buy and how fads and belief-sets come in and out of fashion. He writes about everything from Paul Revere’s midnight ride (did you know there was another rider who failed to get the warning out to…[Read more]

I wonder if you could get in touch with arborists or whoever is in charge of the street trees for the City of Minneapolis? There are heated sidewalks downtown and street trees – Gleditsia mostly if I remember correctly – they were in tree grates as well.
I would bet that the trees had no insulation from the sidewalk heat….they were mature a…[Read more]

Thanks Cliff. I think this is the thread…http://land8lounge.com/forum/topics/is-clarbs-redline-review Lots of little tidbits in there!

Yea for you! I Passed C too! Thanks everyone for your tips – particularly Andrew G. ‘follow the instructions exactly!’ and the other warnings about precision. I took it to heart – there wasn’t an imprecise turn radius to be seen!

Many appear not to be sustainable because they take a ecosystem (vertical jungle) and place it completely out of context. The requirement to sustain this kind of life generally aren’t (or can’t be) met in the design solution.
In most locations, they would need deeper soil profiles that are horizontally stratified, not vertical containerized s…[Read more]

Definitely lean more heavily on the books!
I haul a ton of design books with me to the client meeting and use them to help root out their tastes, likes, dislikes, maintenance interestes and capabilities, etc and often use the books to help describe the potential I see for the site based on their preferences – they get drawings too, but it real…[Read more]

I went from MN to CA with no problem – I just visited nurseries, walked around looking at plants and asked a lot of questions. Once you learn how to learn about plants it just gets easier and easier to learn new ecoregions. Plus there is so much plant traffic from east to west, overseas to the US you will probably be at least passingly familiar wi…[Read more]

Andrew – Thats just not the reality of the situation for everyone.
 
When I got laid off I looked at the income/time ratio for a month of working the kind of low paying job available in my area vs how many hours I could work in landscape design to make the same amount of $ – I would only work 24 hours PER MONTH to make the same amount, so that mea…[Read more]

I don’t know if there is one or not, but it might really be useful for some of us to start a ‘start-ups’ page – how we started our own businesses, what resources we needed and used, what our financial goals were, finding projects, etc.

Very inspirational reply! Thanks! See people – you CAN start your own firm and make a living!

Sorry to hear it. Sounds like a frustrating place to work. Too bad most LAs don’t apply their creativity to their business plans and just follow the financial framework, organizational development platform and corporate culture used and abused by miriad non-creative businesses.
 

For starters, when I’m fired up a reasonable discussion isn’t what I really want, but it sounds like you have plenty of disgruntled company at your firm already, so I won’t add to it…..It doesn’t sound like the morale is very good either among the people running the company….nor does it sound like your firm has very good avenues of…[Read more]

ooh – love the cor-ten steel with gravel tread surface idea! wouldn’t that be beautiful with the blue-grey rock? The top might be a little sharp – maybe use a bent edge..

 
Interesting article on coworking spaces and employment in general particularly since the recession hit….http://newurbannetwork.com/article/when-coworking-comes-town-13950

First of all – good for you! Thanks for doing this work with kids!
I’ll second the basic skills comment by Andrew.
One thing I’ve done in the past with at-risk kids at an alternative school, which may or may not be who you are working with, is just teaching them to vegetable garden – about soils, a little about design (but really about abstract…[Read more]

I wouldn’t call their project bio-filtration, but constructed wetlands. http://water.epa.gov/type/wetlands/upload/design.pdf  or http://www.cabmphandbooks.com/Documents/Development/TC-21.pdf It seems like bio-filtration is commonly used to describe bacterial water treatment systems, either aerobic or anaerobic and are usually used in the context o…[Read more]

Doesn’t look like you used Blurb, Nick, but for anyone who is interested in publishing a book of their own work for portfolio use or marketing its very affordable with good print and paper quality. I’ve published several ‘books’ and they have all turned out well. I put ‘books’ in parenthesis because they were really photography collections, not…[Read more]