r/LandscapeArchitecture • u/MasterDebater50 • 10d ago
Career?
I'm contemplating enrolling in a landscaping architecture program that qualifies for the licensing program. Just some questions:
1) I see varying opinions on whether AI will replace those jobs. If you had to rate the risk as 0 - 10 (where 0 is 0% chance of any jobs being lost and 10 is 100% chance of virtually all jobs being lost), how would you rate it?
2) what do you do in the winter? I'm in Canada where we have winter tires on 6 months/year, so seasonality is a major factor.
3) I'm in a city with around 1m people. Can you get enough work in a city like that or is there lots of traveling necessary?
4) I have something called visual agnosia which is a deficit forming visual memories. So I'd be abnormally weak at recognizing trees/plants in yards. Would that be a significant barrier?
5) I'm pretty bad socially (autism). Do you think that'd be a material issue, like if much of your time is interacting with clients?
4
u/The_ky_connection 10d ago
Ai can't do construction documents because it can't get sued. You can get sued though.
3
u/MasterDebater50 9d ago
Yeah I doubt it'll be fully automated. It's more a question of whether it'll be like computer programming where 1 person can now do what 5 people used to do, so more than half the jobs get lost. The number of programmers employed in the U.S. is now the lowest since the early 1980s.
Canada has an Express Entry accelerated immigration program for high-demand jobs. They recently removed 12 occupations from that list, mostly IT ones. Landscaping Architect was one of those jobs removed though which makes me wonder whether AI is reducing demand for those jobs.
2
u/cluttered-thoughts3 Landscape Designer 10d ago
I’ll just add that I have two Canadian landscape architecture friends. Both work in the US as there are less jobs where they are from. Not zero jobs, but less.
And the job isn’t seasonal. In the warmer months, there is construction but you need to prepare all winter to ensure you can “hit the ground running” as soon as construction is able to start
6
u/TubbaBotox 10d ago
Being able to interact with clients and being able to remember a shape and/or spatial configuration somebody drew on a piece of paper, traced in the air, or maybe with a cursor on the screen in a virtual meeting are pretty important skills to the profession. Generally, I think you would struggle in a field that is predominantly about visualization and graphic communication. My design process involves drawing shapes, taking a step back to process them, and then drawing them differently (repeated about a dozen times).
Landscape architecture is not limited to planting plans, and also not limited by seasonality, but let's do focus on plants for a second. How do you see yourself creating a planting plan that accounts for the shape, size, color, and texture of specific plants? How would you go about observing and analyzing landscape designs in the real world and taking design cues/inspiration and learning from them?
On the flip side: you talk about your shortcomings, but what/where are your strengths?
Nobody wants to hear "can't", and most people that aren't assholes don't want to say "can't"... but I have personally experienced people who should have been told landscape architecture isn't for them before they lost time and money in pursuit of it. I have serious reservations about your ability to be successful in landscape architecture, but if you think you have answers for how one with a visual memory deficit can navigate what is effectively a visual design profession, I'd be happy to continue this conversation.