BY BRADFORD MCKEE

FROM THE NOVEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

I speak from the heart, and this month, it’s about something even more important to landscape architecture than politics: drawings—the wonderful drawings designers make to build their projects. You love drawings. We love drawings. They’re the sheet music to sites. When Mildred Schmertz, the famed former editor of Architectural Record, died earlier this year, I recalled a phone conversation she and I had when I was a newbie at Architecture magazine. She said: “Drawings, drawings, drawings. You can never give readers enough drawings.”

When we look at drawings here at the magazine, and we are greedy about hauling them in from offices, we want to have it all ways in service to you, the reader. We want scope. We also want detail. These two imperatives duke it out for the four corners of the magazine spreads. We think we’ve made the right decision. Then comes a thoughtful letter like one I got from a reader, Cecil Charles Maxfield of Brattleboro, Vermont:

“It’s that time of month again when I must pull out my magnifying glass if I am going to make any sense of plans and keys attached to the articles in LAM. As the plans and graphics are meant to enhance the information in the articles, I find it frustrating in the extreme that they are not at a size nor font which is readable to the naked eye; thus my reliance on the trusted old magnifying glass.”

Mr. Maxfield has an excellent point, one we struggle over. We often find ourselves looking over certain drawings that will show the huge, ambitious plan for a project. When you zoom in to look, it may also be a comprehensive planting plan that tells the quantities and arrangements of the plants installed. There are clues in these drawings—clues about which plants the designer expects will work as a lasting composition or as a thriving community of species. There may be unexpected or unfamiliar species, especially the farther from the continental United States we roam. At times, we’ll show the big scheme to show the big idea, and then excerpt part of an intensive planting area to show the horticulture at work.

We have to make choices, not just about content, but about clarity. The question we have for you, the reader, is: What works best? Do you want to see the big picture or the detail? Do you want to see both? Are there preferences for the ways site drawings are shown? We know, of course, that where vertical moves come into play, a section or section–elevation is imperative. We also enjoy showing the guts and hardware—the fine details that keep designers awake nights, such as footings, soil profiles, ramp buildups, and the like. We can switch things up. We have the ability to do “gatefolds,” as they are known in printing, to stretch two pages to three. Is there any way to satisfy all or most of the things you want to know about a project from drawings? We have been told by principals that they take the drawings into their studios and parse them with staff designers for learning. Is it preferable to show one or two whole drawings large and leave the rest out? Given that not everything can run large, is a magnifying glass so bad?

I hope you’ll help us by telling us what you think about the best use of drawings by e-mailing us at lam@asla.org with any frustrations or insights.

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It was a sorrow to us at LAM to learn in September of the death of William S. Saunders, who in the past several years had contributed to the magazine as its Books editor. Bill, who died in a fall at home in Massachusetts at the age of 72, did a brilliant job with book criticism—and before that, ran a whole publication of beautiful surprises at Harvard Design Magazine for more than a decade. Bill did not do easy edits. He delivered book reviews, not book reports. His own writing was marvelous. After editing a piece he wrote for us on Kongjian Yu, FASLA, in 2013, I told Bill that with his prose he seemed like a director with a handheld camera—a bit frenetic, picking up the peripheral details, catching the mood and the chatter, always making the shot just right. We will miss Bill and send his family our heartfelt condolences.