The ASkLA Podcast and Everything but the Building stake a claim for landscape architecture in your feed.

By Zach Mortice 

In the podcast world, landscape architects are nonnative species—you can find podcasts about other design professions, but landscape architecture is by comparison low profile in this exploding media. This month, two landscape architecture podcasts are launching, one of which focuses on emerging professionals.

The ASkLA Podcast grew out of a series of Facebook Live chats called ASLA Ask Me Anything (AMA). A few months ago, the host, Daniel Martin, Honorary ASLA, and his colleagues on ASLA’s Emerging Professionals Committee decided to transition the live Q and As into a podcast series. The initial run of AMAs interviewed practitioners including Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, and Gina Ford, FASLA, to create a forum where emerging professionals could put forth any question on their minds about how their own careers developed, and critical moments that altered their professional paths when they were starting out. With ASkLA, Martin wanted to focus on the people asking the questions. “[In] the first six episodes of the podcast, we’re taking people who are emerging professionals, maybe 5 to 10 [years] in practice, and talking to them,” he says.

Martin says that much of the podcast will offer practice-based career counseling, professional guidance, and filling in knowledge gaps that might hinder newish designers by asking those with a bit more experience what they didn’t know at the start of their careers that they wish they’d known. Martin wants to help answer the question: “How can I accelerate my trajectory rapidly and make an impact at a young age?” he says.

Martin wants to give landscape architects a new platform to talk about the irreplaceable value they bring to the public realm. “So, in a lot of the podcast, we talk about, ‘How do we get the word out?’” he says. The most recent episode is an interview with Dalton LaVoie, ASLA, and Andrew Wickham, ASLA, who helped launch ASLA’s World Landscape Architecture Month campaign for 2020, “Life Grows Here.” “That’s exactly what that campaign is about,” Martin says. “Every day you’re enjoying a space that a landscape architect designed.”

The podcast, which is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher, launched in early April, and the next episode of ASkLA will be released on April 20, with part two of the LaVoie and Wickham interview.

Stacey Brochtrup, ASLA, has a new landscape architecture podcast, Everything but the Building, which offers a wider focus. Her goal for the podcast is “to give people inside the profession a broader view of the profession as a whole, but also to educate other people who may not know what landscape architecture is,” Brochtrup says. “It’s about the people, places, and history behind the entire profession.”

Brochtrup, a landscape architect with Arcturis in St. Louis, and the president of ASLA St. Louis, says she wants to use her forum to interview designers, licensure advocates, and companies that support the profession. For the wider design public, that means pointing out the diversity of landscape architecture practice: small residential projects, large urban plans, golf courses, and theme parks. “People don’t realize that we’re involved in these projects, too,” Brochtrup says.

Brochtrup released an intro episode in early April, and the first full episode will go live on April 16—an interview with Wendy Miller, FASLA, the president of ASLA and a landscape architect in North Carolina. The podcast will be available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, and Stitcher, and you can follow Everything but the Building on Twitter and Instagram.