🗓️ March 11-13
📍 Columbus, OH
Exploring the cross-pollination between people, place, practice, and profession.
Cross-Pollinate
→ From November 3rd through December 15th, apply to speak at LABash 2026 here
For any questions, please reach out to →speakers@labash.org.
Session Path 1
Multi-Regional
Landscape architecture is an evolving field that responds to changing climates, cultures, and contexts. So, too, must our ways of seeing and designing them. This track invites speakers who have a multiregional perspective, gathering insight from diverse geographies, communities, and design practices. This cross-regional wisdom brings new perspectives, challenges assumptions, and enriches local practice with a global significance. But, also, these conversations absolutely impart wisdom for the community (and students) that they return home to.
By sharing experiences from the field—physical and metaphorical—participants in this session dive deep into the routes of cross-pollination that shape the future of landscape architecture.
On Peru’s Lake Titicaca, the Uros people construct islands from totora reeds / Julia Watson, Taschen
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What unique challenges or exciting opportunities have emerged from studying, researching, or practicing landscape architecture in a region distinct from another?
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In what ways have the political conditions in your region of interest made an impact on the research/practice of landscape architecture?
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What impact have the climate conditions in your region of interest made on studying landscape architecture?
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How has language—an undeniably essential component in shaping our perception of the world—altered perspectives on landscape architecture and its various contexts?
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What wisdom do you think can be applied to other places of significance?
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Have these regions, in gathering insight from them, gained anything from you studying there?
Session Path 2
Inter-Disciplinary
In today's complex and interconnected world, we know that landscape architects collaborate with a variety of disciplines. A truly meaningful view of design emerges when diverse disciplines such as engineering, environmental science, architecture, fine arts, urban planning, and ecology intersect. Each discipline brings a unique lens through which to consider critical questions related to ecosystems, environmental impact, urban development, building integration, and the construction of a landscape project.
Ultimately, this synergistic approach pushes landscape architects to transcend traditional practice, embracing new design methodologies that inherently integrate interdisciplinary perspectives.
Assistant Professor Michelle Franco's The Diggers Studio: Landscape, Labor, and Representation / Phil Arnold, The Knowlton School.
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How can this iterative, culture-focused collaboration reshape the outcomes of projects?
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What specific engagement methods have you employed to foster genuine communication and collaboration with a community?
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What specific challenges have you encountered when working directly with a community impacted by your designs?
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Are there any gaps between your disposition and that of the community you’re collaborating with, and how did you fill this gap?
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How do you communicate your ideas with non-landscape architects?
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In designing within a community, how have these communities also learned from you?
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What specific engagement methods have you employed to foster genuine communication and collaboration with a community?
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Session Path 4 - Workshop Format
Cross-Methodical
The ways that landscape architects are designing continue to evolve, continuously incorporating engineering, technology, art, ecology, and human senses. As the boundaries between disciplines begin to blur, the potential to visualize, iterate, observe, and create across different approaches to design becomes indispensable. Through a workshop format, we're interested in methods commonly employed in contexts outside of landscape architecture, like planning, architecture, mathematics, engineering, data visualization, and even game design.
When applied to a landscape architecture context, these workshops not only invite new ways to create, but new ways to think.
Port of Morgan City Future Potentials / Landscape Architecture & River-Coastal Science Engineering, Tulane University
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What unexpected synergies have emerged from working in a field adjacent to landscape architecture that might not have materialized otherwise?
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How have these collaborations led to more innovative, resilient, or socially impactful design solutions?
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What challenges and opportunities are there in asserting a field's influence on design decision-making within a multidisciplinary team?
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How have you navigated potential disciplinary silos or differing priorities to ensure your expertise is effectively integrated into the project's core?
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Regardless of whether your work leans more towards an engineering, artistic, or ecological capacity, how has your fundamental approach to design evolved through cross-disciplinary engagement?
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How have you effectively leveraged a unique blend of academic schooling and practical expertise to positively impact project outcomes?
Session Path 3
Trans-Cultural
As we learn from our "compacted grounds," the benefits of collaborating with the communities we build for are increasingly indispensable. With this topic we invite you to share work or experiences in which language, culture, and lived experience intersect with design, and where collaboration across differences becomes an asset, not a disadvantage, to the process and outcome of a project. It highlights stories where community members are not just consulted but become partners in the design process– bringing local knowledge, traditions, and lived experience to the table.
We encourage you to explore how landscape architects can act as facilitators of dialogue between different communities, cultures and histories.
The AI workplace and ArcGIS Deep Learning Workflow / Esri Community
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Where is the method you're showcasing usually implemented, and why should landscape architects be familiar with them?
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What value will students get from learning different methodologies?
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Through your workshop, how will students be able to see the possibilities of landscape architecture differently?
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Why are these techniques not commonly used by students of landscape architecture today?
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How can knowledge from other disciplines be integrated into this methodology to enrich landscape architects' workflow?
Interested in speaking to one of these topics?
→ From November 3rd through December 15th, apply to speak at LABash 2026 here
For any questions, please reach out to →speakers@labash.org