Thomas J. Johnson

Certifiable…? Quite possibly…

A) “Private” documents shouldn’t be left in public places.
B) Looking at a piece of paper, especially in spreadsheet form, one can take-in the whole document before you even realize what you’re looking at.
C) Many Landscape Architecture firms are “Employee Owned Corporations”. If it is truly employee owned (and it’s not just another feel-good b.s.…[Read more]

Low paying profession with lots of expensive certifications and societies… hhhmmmm…. am I missing something?

I would think that having real world experience would help inform your masters. How do you know what you want to concentrate your masters in if you haven’t practiced? What can you bring to a masters program without having first explored the profession?
School and work are much different… to the point that I question how significantly a masters…[Read more]

Government regulations in SE Asia are actually doing away with terraced fields. (not sure if Greenpeace is to blame or not) The ancient agricultural practice encourages bio-diversity by rotating a variety of crops and using the water to raise fish which creates a symbiotic relationship with the crops. The practice is now being replaced by…[Read more]

Yup, you’re right… I thought the article was using swidden synonymously with terraced fields but upon review it’s apparent that terraced fields were one form of agriculture used in the cleared space. It also appears that there are a variety of terraced fields, built in different environments with unique methods. It becomes difficult to…[Read more]

The new LAM has an article on Sasaki’s Sea Pines resort on Hilton Head Island that you might enjoy…

OK, so maybe I underestimated the ecological effects of swidden-cultivation… but it’s a dying practice and is not as bad what they are doing now… still look pretty cool…
 

 
 
Interesting paper on the ecology and sociological implications of terraced fields:
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art20/

http://www.bricsys.com/bricscad/help/en_US/V9/CmdRef/source/H/Hatch/Hatch.htm

Subdivision ideation / precedence?
 


 

Ingenuity.
Without knowing much about the socio-economic-political-environmental issues surrounding this farming practice, the image becomes the foundation of my argument. In the background you can see homes built with respect for their context. They are of reasonable size, staggered on the hillside, enveloped in a canopy of trees, hardly…[Read more]

hhhhmmm… interesting. good point. think i’ll go buy a couple lottery tickets…

And if you can afford to buy a firm, then you can afford to hire people that can do everything better than you can… from design to running your business, essentially creating a situation where you only get in the way of your own success… oh the irony… 
That’s why I think it would have to be a one man operation. If you’re so stinking rich…[Read more]

Get an external hard-drive with at least as many Gigs as your laptop. I.E. 500GB HDD on your Mac = <500GB external HDD.
Then back up the whole thing. You’ll have to do some research and educate yourself on how to do this but you can mirror your laptop HDD onto your external. If your laptop drive dies you can instantly restore it. Back up your data…[Read more]

So you’d be a one-man design firm and you’d contract the built work?

how does that work?

The whole designed landscape should be art. The un-designed landscape is art too. 
If you want to talk about art as being separate from the environment then that’s exactly what it is. An element in space that serves no specific purpose. It is not lighting, a bench, stairs, railing, grading, wall or planting, although those components can be…[Read more]

That sounds like a great program! Would you tell the students what they were participating in or would it be a covert education program that feels more like a mind-game than a real-world learning experience?

No it does not make you a control freak. You should seek out the “maintenance” company that did the work and use a line trimmer on their shins while you recite proper pruning techniques.