Working Across Project Types in Landscape Architecture

By Courtney McKelvey

There's plenty of advice out there for new and established designers to "niche down", but there's something to be said about diversifying the types of projects that you work on.

Working across project types can help sustain your creativity throughout your career, explore new skills, and most importantly—create meaningful spaces for many different types of people. Our landscape architecture studio works with all of our architecture studios to design beautiful, functional, and sustainable landscapes. Creating designs for a diversity of project types and collaborating with different consultants to bring these projects to life helps us flex our problem-solving muscles.

Below are three projects our landscape team worked on with very different needs, each providing unique opportunities to solve design puzzles.

Landscape architecture for living, playing, and learning

Civic Plaza adaptive reuse albquerque new mexico

The renovation of this downtown plaza includes an interactive water feature, playground, shade structures, landscape design, and a stage with new sound and lighting systems. This highly technical project required innovative design solutions and collaborations.

This project creates a new community space surrounding a K-12 school campus, including a new school, student dormitory, fire station, and staff housing. Landscape features include athletics field, residential landscape design for student and staff housing, and learn/play environments.

Sentio multifamily community Phoenix, AZ

This luxury development includes richly landscaped and hardscaped open and covered spaces for walking, sitting, and gathering. Thoughtfully designed pedestrian access connects an active pool/spa area, dog park, and children's play area. The entire site is designed with low water landscape and drought tolerant plants.

Working on projects like these keeps us creatively engaged and excited to work on the next project, whatever it may be.

I encourage young professionals to seek out as much diversity in their projects as they can find. The opportunities I have had to work across these project types has enhanced my experience and my career so much. The distinct needs of varied project types always keeps me on my toes, and allows me to continually explore the relationships between people, function, form, and nature.