what to do

I am not sure what to do with this blog. The best jokes I can come up with usually get their punch from being slightly offensive, and, being that I am quite happy with the Landscape Architecture world and would like to do some serious work in it when I get out of school, I am always wary of postings that might offend potential employers, and I never know when I have crossed the line. I try to keep identifying clues to a minimum, but I don't think it would be that hard to figure out who I am here. Sometimes I wish that I had kept it bereft of such clues, so I could just post anything I like. for example, I would like to say that a lot of what Landscape Architects do is more or less exactly the same thing that Landscape Designers and contractors do, except that we dress it up with a lot of pretentious theoretical nonsense. But I can't say that, not here anyway. I heard a landscape architect say "We create spaces. Contractors draw wiggly worms around buildings." Truly there is quite a difference between a space that was designed in a deliberate and thoughtful way by a trained professional and one that was just laid out by a contractor to look neat and organized, rows of hollies interspersed with street trees or whatever. Generally speaking, we do it much better and it is worth the expense (hiring us). But there is at times an awful lot of BS in the process. I guess that is true of many professions. Yeah, I guess, come tho think of it, we are no worse than lawyers or mortgage bankers or real estate developers or any other fee-for-service profession you can name. So I'm glad I did not say THAT.

The other thing I would say, if this were truly an anonymous forum, is that, in landscape architecture, you have a choice. You can work for the devil or you can work for the angels. You are a skilled professional and your services are sought after by the various government agencies and nonprofits who are trying to preserve the precious remnants of our ecological heritage, as well as by the developers who want to destroy it. If you work for the devil, the rewards include riches beyond your wildest imagining, and your name in magazines and eventually in textbooks and the sacred archives of LA history, and you will be lauded as a genius. If you work for the angels, you will labor in obscurity, for a respectable but entirely predictable income for the rest of your days. But of course the choice is much more complicated than that. Best management practices are becoming universally accepted in the construction industry, and the concept of sustainability is being applied more and more to all practices and processes. But to what degree is "sustainability" just a public relations item in the real world of Orlando, Dallas, Atlanta, where the action is? As Obi Wan says, "only a Sith deals in absolutes." I would never seriously put forth the "there are two paths you can go by" dichotomy. But just the fact that it is on my mind is, well, scandalous.

Yep.