Tosh K

It all leads to… We should be leading project teams.

Isn’t this part of every project team meeting and client meeting?  We, all too often, have to state why a client/team should have us on board.  It’s a valuable question to ask day in and day out – it might be easier and rather inane to those of us who have been around for a bit, but one every student ought to be asking and challenging.

-systems related design/analysis/thinking
-change over time
-understanding processes

Have you asked the recent grads from those schools?  The upper tier east coast school grads (from schools I have contacts with) are at about 50% employment in the profession, another 25% in a related line of work.

I believe the financial planner’s advice is to only take out as much in loans as you expect your first year salary to be ($35k if you expect your salary to be $35k, $50k in loans if you expect your salary to be $50k).  If the federal IBR (Income Based Repayment, where the maximum monthly payment is 15% of your adjusted gross income and after 25…[Read more]

The AREs ($210×7=1470) cost about the same as the LAREs ($1526) provided you don’t register late.  And while the PE is cheaper ($200~$300), it’s an open book exam and the books you need are not even close to ours in cost when you add them up; the prep courses are in the thousands of dollars as well. 
Considering how few LA candidates there are, I…[Read more]

The cynics in St Louis use to muse about the thousands of daffodils a mayor planted – they always come up in time for elections. 
Daffodils I believe are being used as NYC’s “living memorial” to 9-11 throughout the city as well.

SF’s parklets would probably fit into “temporary” as well as PARKing day (though it’s for a day, it could go…[Read more]

There’s enough less academic folks  who can write for a mainstream audience, I personally find most PhD driven writing in any field to be intentionally difficult to digest.  Like Birnbaum and others I would like to read more LAs writing in mainstream media to a broader audience, though Arieff seems to imply that we don’t even have enough a…[Read more]

Short answer is ask before you use anything personally.  If it’s a drawing that’s been made public (via the web or in print) then you should be fine as long as you cite your source.  If it’s internal then get permission.  Confidentiality is very important, especially in this economic climate, you need to ensure that whatever you may show won’t je…[Read more]

Kongjian Yu at Turenscape & Adrian Geuze at West 8 would be worthwhile to look into.  Not just because of their ‘design’ work, but also for their understanding of what the built work can do socially, politically and culturally.  I admire them for taking a deep interest in the relationship of the culture they live in with the built and unbuilt e…[Read more]

i believe ‘building architects’ is the term often used to label the architects that focus on structures/buildings as opposed to landscape, some folks feel the name ‘landscape architects’ being used while the ‘building architects’ calling themselves ‘architects’ derogatory and/or condescending.

‘Senior thesis’ has been popular in colleges…[Read more]

I’d have to assume Penn, with their love affair with Rhino would be involved as well as a few of the more “digitized” schools.  It seems building architects have been more involved digitally and are more actively pursuing this way of working.  Personally I feel that landscape architects are more consciously aware that the parameters we work with a…[Read more]

UCincinnati; from before Hargreaves’ involvement to today is one of the greatest transformations of a campus.

I’d have to assume that this was part of the design consideration.

It’s great once you do the due diligence (checking for and mitigating contaminants like lead); New Haven has a pretty extensive strategy in place that’s being executed by a group of dedicated non-profits. 

Nice to make the NYT, now it would have been nice had the authored mentioned how this is “environmentally friendly.”  Personally I look forward to how the clipped and pollarded trees will be received by the general public.

I got into it fine using the built in tutorials, the duck gets through most of the basics for modeling.

“infinite forest” is a nice sell, not sure how it’ll work-  maintenance might be a bear, but the holocaust memorial in boston would seem like it’s got a lot of potential problems but has held up well.

Overall it seems predictable and a one liner – translucent high reflective glass on at least a couple sides would seem to allow for a more…[Read more]

lllustrator – illustrative refining of vector (line) graphics, diagramming
InDesign – sheet/book layout; learn to use spell check well.
Photoshop – manipulation of raster images (often photos/renderings)
Acrobat – PDF document refinement/presentation; allows for “slideshows” of pdfs, which when created in InDesign allows for more control and…[Read more]

Can you use the AIA backed credits from the article in Architectural Record?  I’m sure many libraries carry it and I believe they have articles each month (articles have quizzes in the back).