BSLA Fieldbook BSLA 2015 Spring Fieldbook | Page 64

BSLA

/ MEMBER

CYNTHIA SMITH, FASLA
REFLECTIONS ON HOW TO BECOME A
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND HOW TO KEEP
AT IT (EVER-BLOOMING)
6. Try (and maybe fail) to get accepted as

1. In your childhood, spend as much
unsupervised time as you can wandering the
back woods, tooling around on your bicycle
throughout your neighborhood, climbing
(and falling) out of trees, and hanging upside
down on jungle gyms and getting flung off
merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters.

2. Make sure you look at those old art books
in the living room bookcases put there by
your parents—you know the ones I’m talking
about—with the sensuous Grant Wood
landscape paintings with the rolling hills, tiny
farms, and country roads (and the nudes).

3. In your adolescent years, venture a little
further out—exploring and sketching—for me
it was the formal landscapes of the National
Mall, the tree lined boulevards, and Beatrix
Farrand’s Dumbarton Oaks that left life-long,
lasting impressions.

4. Go to school out west (or far, far away) and
discover the wildness of mountains, rivers,
valleys, and understand the legibility of
the landscape. Keep multiple sketch books
and journals, draw, draw, draw as much as
possible and learn a little about design.

5. Come back east to a new city and get
your first job at one of the greatest multidisciplinary firms in the country, mentor
under a skilled and hopefully charismatic
landscape architect and get paid to travel.

a Rome Prize winner and go to the GSD
(or other Ivy finishing school) instead.
(Don’t get discouraged.) Learn about
Starchitecture and Urban Design—or is it
Landscape Urbanism?? —and take lots of
joint studios with LAs, UDs and Architects.

7. Graduate without too many student loans
and work for one of the best West Coast
landscape architecture and planning firms
(with a local Boston office) and top it off
by working at all of their branch offices
(including Laguna Beach!).

8. Get involved in the Boston Chapter of
the ASLA (including serving as President)
and make sure you do this at the most
inopportune time career-wise (like when
you are pregnant). If you get involved with
the BSLA,it results in lifelong friendships,
provides you with wide ranging leadership
skills (such as public speaking), has immense
personal rewards, and allows you an
opportunity to give back to the profession!

9. Find an amazing, collaborative regional
landscape architecture practice where you
can “think globally and act locally” and not
have to travel so much.

10. Get involved in your community.
11. Hire people who are smarter and more
talented than you so your business can
thrive—make sure you are collaborative
and have fun.

12. Don’t forget to smell the roses and keep
your appreciation of the landscape “Alive.”

Started Out
Education
Now

62

BSLA

Washington, DC
BLA, University of Oregon; MLA/UD, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Vice President, Halvorson Design Partnership, Inc.