BY WENDY GILMARTIN

Working in a multidisciplinary firm means every day is different.

FROM THE DECEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

You certainly never get bored in a multidisciplinary office. A landscape architect might find herself reviewing federal endangered species listings, hydrology maps, or legal frameworks for land use planning in the daily shuffle, and these are just some of the diverse types of work likely to be present. Industrial mining methods, vernal pool construction, and high-rise plumbing systems could also come into play. The number of landscape architects working in these professional environments is growing as businesses find a competitive edge providing full, in-house services for site development projects that require expertise from designers but also from scientists, legal teams, and engineers. Four landscape architects at the center of these integrated office types share insights about collaboration, isolation, and the willingness to learn something new each day.

Interviews have been edited and condensed.

Weston & Sampson, Boston

Gene Bolinger, ASLA, Vice President

What are lessons learned from working in a multidisciplinary office for more than 25 years?

Staff at Weston & Sampson (clockwise from left): Elise Bluell, Associate ASLA; Cassidy Chroust, ASLA; Desmond Fang; Brandon Kunkel; and Farah Dakkak, Associate ASLA. Image courtesy of Weston & Sampson.

I came to Weston & Sampson through an acquisition, and I’ve been here since the fall of 1991. Weston & Sampson is an environmental and infrastructure engineering firm, and it’s one of those old, legacy northeastern firms. It’s been around since 1899. One of our larger clients is the City of Boston Parks and Recreation Department, and at any given time, we have  eight to 10 projects under way with the City of Boston. We’re pushing up against 500 people in our organization and, again, we’re mostly in the Northeast, with the largest projects in Massachusetts, for sure. Just recently the firm went to a discipline-based structure—we’re actually six disciplines. One of the disciplines is the design discipline, and I manage the design discipline. I’ve become accustomed to working within a multidisciplinary realm, and I celebrate what’s great about it and try to take advantage of what’s great about it.

If you’re sitting back on your hands and you’re assuming that people are going to be delivering exactly what you want at the exact moment you want it, you’re so mistaken. So, that’s why you can’t let things slip the same way you might let them slip [when they] are within your own control. You want to stay up two, three, or four nights in a row to bang that out? Sure, you can do that, you’re controlling your own destiny, but you can’t operate that way when you’re relying on others to provide critical pieces of the overall design package. For somebody who worked in a purely landscape architecture practice, that would be a little bit of a change in the way you operate, because you allocate 100 percent of your time to pushing forward the landscape architecture components of a project. In a multidisciplinary firm on a multidisciplinary project, you have to carve out some of that time to manage those disciplines and make sure that everything is going to be delivered in a way that you expect. And in fact, I think, we don’t do a great job at this, but the architecture realm does better. When you’re setting up a project from a budget standpoint, there should be fees that are specifically allocated to managing other disciplines. So, it’s purely project management. You’re not pushing forward the design of the project.

What challenges are there in day-to-day collaboration with someone from a different professional background, or from a different educational background, be it an engineer or scientist?

Landscape architects and architects operate in certain ways, and it’s not remotely close to the way that technical professionals—engineers in this case—work. And I think you need an appreciation for that. Otherwise, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed when they’re not delivering what you need, when you need it. They’re not motivated by the same things. They hate surprises. They hate last-minute fire drills, so you have to be incredibly proactive and you’ve got to be timely. And it may be okay to leave your work until the last moment, you know, and spend two nights in a row all night long working. But it’s not all right to manage the multidisciplinary aspects of the project that need to be delivered by other technical people in that fashion. You’ve got to stay out in front of that.

What we do when our multidisciplinary projects will have several engineers involved is, we’ll prepare a paragraph, like a scope of work, and identify the cost, just as if I were an external client. So, they might be providing structural engineering work to us on a park project that we’re leading, but we could be providing landscape architecture support to them on some sort of other project that they might be leading. And that way, you don’t get these missed cues that might occur if everything’s too familiar and too comfortable and too cozy, and we’re not checking in with each other frequently enough.

WRA, Inc., San Rafael, California, and Denver

George Salvaggio, ASLA, Principal

Tell me a bit about WRA.

Staff at WRA (clockwise from left): Leslie Lazarotti; Ingrid Morken, ASLA; Gwen Santos; Haley Cahill; and Isaac Swanson. Image courtesy of WRA, Inc.

WRA is an environmental consulting company, and the disciplines here are wetland scientists, botanists, and wildlife biologists, and then we have a group of people who are experts in regulatory permits that you need for a project relative to aquatic and animal endangered species and resources. And then we also have a mitigation banking department. The landscape architecture department has traditionally been about 10 percent of the total staff. That’s tracked consistently over the last 20 years. The firm is about 35 years old, so the first 15 years, they didn’t have design; I brought design and started it about 20 years ago. So, once we introduced it, it’s always been a very comfortable fit.

What was your background before joining the WRA team?

I came out of graduate school and knew that I wanted to do restoration design. I did an MLA program, but specialized in wetland plant establishment. I approached this firm, which had done a lot of wetland and stream designs and concepts providing mitigation for development, and they did all the permitting and they did all the monitoring, but they had never done the detailed design work and developed instruction sets for those projects. I pitched that to them, and it’s been very successful over the years. We have a portfolio of park and open space projects, and in particular, they are projects that have big restoration components.

And how do those projects come into the office?

The public parks come out of competitive RFPs through government or municipalities. The development work comes from either real estate or commercial development, and then the mitigation work, especially the mitigation banking, comes from us going out and searching for landowners and then marrying those with financial investors and providing technical resources to implement those projects. Developers might affect one or two acres of wetlands and the project might be to replace one or two acres. In the mitigation banking realm, we’re looking for very large properties, and we design and prebuild the wetlands or streams, and we entitle them and sell those credits on the open market to developers as they need them. The most recent vernal pool projects we’ve done, those are building 30 to 40 acres of vernal pools, and then the largest project we’re pursuing currently, we’re going to build 3,200 acres of tidal marsh.

What type of landscape architects would you be looking to hire now?

Traditionally, we’ve done very well with MLA candidates when their first degrees were often in one of the sciences; for example, they’re in botany or environmental resources. In my case, I was a biologist. So, they already come with an interdisciplinary background and can sympathize in the interdisciplinary solution space. The other thing is they come with a passion for the outdoor world and the natural space, and you have to be willing to commit your time and your career to that, because it’s very different from traditional design in the sense that the subject matter is different. To have a candidate come with a demonstration from some interdisciplinary aptitude, even academically, has really served us well. It tends to represent the diversity of our interests, too. I think we spend more time dealing with soil than hydrology. Most of our staff here can actually compose hydrology through grading and in a variety of different ways.

Staff at Great Ecology (from left): Sara Coop Franz; Chris Loftus, ASLA; and Kay Wiseman. Photo by Liz Clift.

Great Ecology, New York

Linda Gumeny, ASLA, Director of Design

Tell me a bit about what Great Ecology does.

The firm was started in New York by Mark Laska—he’s an ecologist—and it’s a mixed firm because we bring a wide range of ecological consulting [services]. It was probably about 12 years ago that we added designers into the firm. I think that makes us unique in that we can combine design and ecological thinking when we’re approaching our projects. We do a lot of wetland restoration, stream restoration, different kinds of ecological studies. More than half the work is private work, from big industry, oil and gas companies, chemical companies—that’s where our restoration comes into play. Say, for instance, an industrial client is closing down a plant: We help them develop ideas on how they can use their site, help remediate.

What would you tell a landscape architect considering this type of work, coming from a strictly landscape design-based office into a multidisciplinary organization?

If you’re coming into a multidisciplinary type environment, then you need to reach out and make sure that you’re not creating your own silo within your firm and offer your advice, your help, ask for help, let people understand what you’re capable of. I found that I needed to do that when I came into this firm a few years ago. I had a portfolio of projects that weren’t typically done in Great Ecology, so I showed a little PowerPoint of my work and what I’d been doing over the course of my career and said, “This is how I could help all you people across the country who don’t know me personally.” Likewise, I need to know the specialty of every ecologist in my firm, so that if something pops up, I can say, “We’ve got somebody who can do that for you.”

So you did do a bit of networking and kind of an introduction when you started?

Internal networking. It’s not much different from when you need to network to meet other people on the outside, or if you’re in a landscape architecture firm and you need to build a team to pursue a proposal. It’s the same situation; it’s just a different environment.

You mentioned being siloed or sequestered into your discipline when in a multidisciplinary environment. What are good ways to alleviate that issue?

I think it’s important to explain to people, other people in different disciplines, what you do. I guess I’m thinking about being in an engineering firm many years ago where some engineers didn’t think that landscape architects really did anything besides planting, and it was a matter of just explaining to them what you’re capable of so that they have a level of comfort and confidence in your ability. So, I would say again, it’s outreach.

Staff at Perkins+Will (in left-hand room, from left): Julia Witherspoon; Matt Malone, ASLA; Laura Taylor; Johannes Ubben; and Jennifer Cooper-Sabo, ASLA. Photo by Joe Ben.

Perkins+Will, San Francisco

Jennifer Cooper-Sabo, ASLA, Landscape Practice Lead/Senior Associate

Perkins+Will is traditionally known for architecture. How is it different from working in a traditional landscape design office?

Just like any type of firm, you might spend a year working on a certain type of project, but then you switch to a completely different type of project, and there’s a benefit to being able to focus on a type of project just to develop a certain sort of proficiency in that. What I do find with my staff is there’s a fear of getting bored in their professional lives, and I think they like the fact that they have options. I think that gives them a certain sense of comfort that they know they’re going to have an interesting day of work no matter what comes up. This is probably true in large landscape architecture firms as well, but we do have a lot more opportunity to do research. We have a research journal, and we have these innovation incubator events where staff can suggest a project that they want to do and then get a stipend and a week to work on that idea. And I think those are things that I’ve seen in other landscape architecture firms that I’ve been a part of. Not only having the ability to work on projects of different scales, but also then maybe you’re doing research and writing and prototyping something new as part of your work.

What a great opportunity!

I think what’s always been a big complaint of landscape architecture is that we’re brought in by architects after all the big decisions have already been made, and we can’t have as big of an impact. So, being in the first meetings with the client and the team and being able to make all the suggestions that you wish you could have made at the beginning of the project—now I get to make them. That’s been really great for us to be able to influence the process. We’re working on a high-rise in Oakland, and at the very beginning we got to meet with a structural engineer and say, “Okay, we’re going to need stormwater management on the roof, so that means we need this much soil. We want some trees over here.” And if you’re in it from the beginning, they can plan stuff, but when they’ve already got it set and coordinated and they say “Okay, you’ve got six inches of soil to work with,” it really limits your creativity, so I think being in from the beginning really gives us a lot more ability to affect the overall project.

Are there drawbacks?

One of the challenges is, because we’re in-house, it could be very tempting to come to us all the time or [expect] that we have to be in every meeting. But, you still need to be competitive in your fees, right? So, if you’re in every single meeting, it’s very difficult to be competitive. We’ve been a lot more strategic about that, in that we can come in, we insist on really being in the front end of the project and having a charrette with the client and the architect and the structural engineer and the civil [engineer] and everybody, so we are all on the same page about stormwater and structure and all those things that can only be decided in the beginning, and then we can go away for a while. We’ll hop back in at a certain point when we need to give strategic input, and dig in again during design development and construction drawings, but that way, we get to give the input that’s really necessary for us to do a creative project, and it’s not a burden on fees.

Wendy Gilmartin is a writer and architect in Los Angeles. She is the founding principal of Wendy Gilmartin Architecture. She teaches in the College of Environmental Design at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona.