Hi folks,
I’m a landscape designer with about 2 years of experience, currently working toward licensure.
When I was in school, I found landscape architecture really interesting and meaningful. During my first couple of months in practice, I still enjoyed it. But over the past year, I’ve started to feel more bored and frustrated.
Part of this comes from my workplace — management isn’t great, and there’s very little clear direction. From talking with classmates, it seems like I’m not alone. A lot of PMs are constantly under pressure, quick-tempered, and tend to micromanage, which feels like a pretty common management style in the field.
Another thing that’s been bothering me is the licensure path. Many senior designers in my office aren’t licensed, and for those of us working hard toward licensure, there doesn’t seem to be a clear reward — no noticeable salary increase or bonus. It makes me question what the payoff really is.
I’m also concerned about the industry overall. Many firms I know haven’t been winning new projects recently, and hiring has paused. Without much growth of this industry, it’s hard to see what long-term personal career development looks like.
On the tech side, while AI is transforming many industries, landscape architecture feels relatively forgotten. So far, most of its use seems limited to rendering and visualization, and even that still requires a lot of manual correction for accuracy. I’ve experimented with parametric tools myself in my firm, but for now basically it's just paving pattern or panel pattern generating. The site analysis could be done in grasshopper to generate pretty drawings - but no budgets for that.
I’m not trying to rant — just curious to hear others’ perspectives.
How are you seeing the future of landscape architecture right now?