There’s quite a lot of stirring these days in landscape architecture offices, and it’s enough to make firm owners and leaders nervous in unfamiliar ways. Office leaders have surely heard about the New York architecture firm SHoP, where a group of employees mounted an effort to join a union in protest of the working conditions designers have long taken in stride—they cited relentlessly long hours, lack of transparency, and salaries few would consider fat. (The effort failed.) Bosses are also no doubt alert to a rising tide of job promiscuity among career designers. Though staffers aren’t all picking up and moving on to better gigs, many may well be thinking about it. They see novel employment pathways opening amid the pandemic’s supercharged sense of virtual mobility, and they’ve had a good, long spell during lockdowns to reconsider their passions and purpose in work and life. They’re scarcely alone in the labor market. Employers across industries have been rocked by droves of departures nationwide since 2020. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in 2021, employees left jobs in record numbers; several months had more than four million voluntary resignations each. The total of farewell clock-outs for the year was estimated at 38 million people—a kind of Brexit from the payrolls.

Most people aren’t quitting work entirely but are seeking change, choice, and fluidity in their careers. Amid the huge upheavals of the past few years, the landscape architecture profession has hardly changed the ways and the weight of its work. Meanwhile, the ground around it has been shifting. The pandemic has forced the mass rearrangement of where and how colleagues work together. The Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and gender movements have blown up to revolution levels, and they are here to stay, because many people find they still get less than full equality in daily life. At everyone’s fingertips, digital media is radically expanding individuals’ abilities to reach others and to realize their ambitions in ways once inconceivable. People trained in the accepted traditions of landscape architecture, between the new entrants and those approaching midcareer stages, may find they have fresh options—within their chosen profession, outside of it, or in some remix of the two.  

For a snapshot of current thinking about professional and personal life among landscape architects and designers, a group of 10 designers participated in a virtual conversation that took place over the course of a week. Seven of the participants work in various project design and execution roles, two are founders of their firms, and one is an associate principal. Their responses to the quality-of-life questions posed give credence and texture to broad movements that employment analysts and design-industry advisers are charting. [...]

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