My Experience as a Landscape Architect

I have had a great time over the last number of weeks taking on the role of the landscape architect in our team.

I found it to be a really rewarding learning experience and my team mates were really good and helped out throughout the whole process.

Concept Presentation

I struggled a bit doing the landscape plan as I found it difficult to find other plans that I could look at for inspiration to get an idea of how they are actually done. Arch1 found some great online tutorials for me that were extremely helpful. This taught me new photoshop skills that I will even be able to use in the future. Arch1 was good like this, throughout the project he was always teaching me new computer skills and eager to give me tutorials when there was time. I was very grateful for this, I have certainly learnt a whole lot more about photoshop!

For the concept presentation I already had some great ideas to work with from the landscape charette. Int1 and Arch2 had been really motivated and done some great concept work for 2 areas of the landscape plan. It was great to have some of other peoples inputs to work with and took off a bit of the pressure to design a whole landscape with no experience.

Our interior designer designed and drew up this beautiful plan for the baby play area. Much of this was translated into the final presentation. 

This was the overall plan of our childhood centre with the building in it as well. From this concept phase there was much opportunity for me to improve and further develop the design. 

These are some of the drawings I did for the concept presentation

I found drawing trees and perspectives for landscaping quite a refreshing activity! It was quite  a change from industrial drawings which are very structured and precise. Landscape can be well communicated even through slight abstraction so i found this quite refreshing. It was much easier to express certain atmospheres through quick sketches. From the other landscape plans in the class I think that the hand drawn ones look the most evocative and engaging. In hindsight I would have liked to have drawn our plan as I find drawing much more captivating and enjoyable than working on a  computer. However doing it on the computer saved me having to rush through doing it all again on computer for the final presentation. This also allowed other disciplines to combine their work, giving a greater sense of the site and our overall design.

 

This is the final plan used in our very last presentation. It is much more detailed, resolved and visually understandable.