ENVISION + LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE ORIGINS = Green Infrastructure Standards.

From its very beginning curriculum, every college of landscape architecture in the United States instilled in its students the basics for design and planning of the natural and built environment and how it relates to the preservation of the environment and human health.  As architects pioneer ways to design “greener” buildings, it is safe to say landscape architects have pioneered and implemented ways to design for certain aspects of “green” infrastructure long before the word “green” was used in conjunction with sustainability.   We at Landworks Studio are excited that there is now an infrastructure specific rating system and design tool for engineers, planners, and landscape architects.  In fact, we are so excited about it that half of our staff are now accredited Envision Sustainability Professionals, ENV SP. 

ENVISION was developed by Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure which is a research organization founded by APWA, ACEC and ASCE.  With the involvement of those entities and how the system is structured, we believe ENVISION will be more widely accepted and implemented rating system than other attempts such as Greenroads for example.  If you haven’t already check out the ENVISION resource, you can click here to find out more. 

As far as landscape architects taking credit for initiating green infrastructure, let’s just say we are happy to now have a quality metric in place to align what we have known as standard practice for over a century.