One of the hardest meetings in landscape architecture isn’t the one where a design gets criticized. It’s the one where everyone loves the ideas, and you have to explain that they can’t all happen. A colleague of mine saw this play out firsthand. His firm was hired to landscape a new megachurch campus, and the…
When the contract says plaza and the client says parking lot Early in my career, I was hired to design a plaza for a college campus in Arizona. The client was the campus’s head of landscape architecture, a knowledgeable, well-respected person I wanted to impress. The scope was clear, the contract was signed, and design…
Some of the best lessons in landscape architecture come from the moments when something you relied on stops being true. For me, one of those moments involved a park, a restroom, and a flood study. The Setup We were working for the developer of a master-planned community. The project was a large park and open…