Cross-pollination sustains more than plants.

A drawing workshop in the South Garden / The Knowlton School

If LABash has proven anything, it’s that landscape architecture students are an impassioned group. Every year since 1970, with a pause in 2020, we’ve come together to ask, “what special power does our discipline hold?” Whether it was the University of Guelph’s call to “Reimagine Landscape Architecture,” or Cornell University’s invite to rise from our “Compacted Grounds,” each conference has reflected the spirit of our time through the lens of landscape architecture.

Today, we see our own era marked by a great disconnect. We see division between class, generation, gender, race, profession, religion, political ideology, and much more. We see it everywhere–on the internet, on our college campuses, in the classrooms, in our (lack of) third places. The larger problem of how we are disconnected isn’t new, novel, or but it’s timely. We, students of 2025, are well aware of this. We went from playing outside to playing online, saw the impact of the pandemic on the way we live, and are now active in it through social media and through student groups. We’ll call it the great disconnect, since it involves many different communities, is connected to other huge problems, and there’s no singular way to approach the dilemma.

The Ohio State LABash team is responding to our time through the theme of “Cross-Pollinate.” It’s a term that operates on many different scales. Of course, it explains the pollen transfer between the plants that furnish our designs. It speaks to biodiversity, energy, and the life of landscapes.

But on another level, we know LABash to be an event of cross-pollination. Every year, the conference gathers students, professionals and academics from institutions across North America to exchange ideas. We know that students benefit from inspirational lectures, and that speakers and professionals learn from the next generation of students. We learn the culture and history of a city with field sessions and local speakers. We expand upon a network of relationships that took root in 1970 and (thanks to social media) has even reached beyond North America. Then, we have the fortunate opportunity to carry these insights home to inform our studio projects, conversations, and relationships.

But at LABash 2026, we’d like to take “Cross-Pollinate” even further. Landscape architecture students learn to visualize, model, articulate, and present. Eventually, we will collaborate not only with architects, city planners, ecologists, civil engineers, environmental scientists, artists, but also communities. We become immersed in a user experience, learn how to communicate in different ways, and tackle distinct sites with unique iterations. We study history to understand the environmental, social, and political forces that shape our landscapes today. We look at precedents from across the world, examining how a community from a different climate, region, and culture responds to a problem, and how these lessons can further our own designs.

For a huge problem that has no singular answer, involves different communities, and that gets closer to being “solved” with each iteration, who is better fit to tackle this than landscape architects?

At LABash 2026, we’ll celebrate how landscape architecture truly excels in facing wicked problems. We’ll grow your repertoire of design precedents, dive deeper into the forces that shape our landscape designs, and improve the skills that make our field unique. But, we’ll also look beyond North America and the traditional precedents of our time. We will examine how landscape architecture interacts with other disciplines, how language might impact our perspective on the field, as well as the power we hold outside of the design realm.

“Cross-Pollinate” speaks to the mutual exchange we envision for LABash. We hope you come away asking how other people, places, and professions can learn from the landscape architecture that we know to be excellent. The problems ahead require the traits that landscape architects have. Why wouldn’t we want to share them?