Charles Jensen | Writer

….a landscape architect.

My first honest-to-god job after college was working in the hustle and bustle of Ellerbe Becket—architects, engineers, and designers. It was a world completely foreign to me, albeit interesting. I moved into marketing the higher education project proposals and discovered an odd little creature amid all this corporate-Americaness: the campus planner.

The planners marched to an entirely different drum than the rest of the firm. They had vision! They had moxie! They made things more efficient! And looking at their designs—the perfectly circular lines of trees, the campus paths, the traffic flow diagrams, classroom audits and departmental organizational patterns. Gosh! It was all so romantic and beautiful. I loved looking at the work and imagining what it would be like to walk through those beautiful, perfect, planned campuses.

But, I have a crap attention to detail and I can’t draw. Although I love to organize and structure things, sometimes my ideas of structure are a bit arbitrary. And while I love compiling and analyzing data, it can just as easily bore me.

But I still remember those wonderful people, those visionaries, who, even now, are hunched over their desks, marking out the pathways we will one day walk again…