Robyn Lane, teaching assistant professor of landscape architecture, joined the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design as adjunct faculty in the fall of 2022. She moved to full-time in 2023.
Before joining the school, Lane worked as a research assistant at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) for 12 years. As a CAST associate, her time was primarily allocated to education and outreach in applied geospatial technologies for K-12, post-secondary, and adult continuing education. Before working at CAST, Lane worked as a licensed landscape architect and project manager involved in commercial site development, municipal improvement projects and park design, with a primary focus on low-impact development in an urban setting.
Lane has a doctorate in environmental dynamics, a master’s in geography, and a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, all from the University of Arkansas.
What drew you to landscape architecture?
When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be an architect. As I became a teenager, I decided instead that I wanted to be an English professor. I started at Hendrix as an English major, but after two years, I decided that wasn’t the right path for me and I transferred to the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the beginning of my junior year. At that point, first-year design studios for landscape architecture and architecture students were together, and my instructor was a landscape architect. That’s how I got my introduction to landscape architecture; I kind of fell into it. I decided to go into landscape architecture after my first year of design school.
What was your timeline for coming back to teach at the Fay Jones School?
After I graduated, I was working on a large project for a big commercial retailer, and their real-estate manager had chosen a site down in Hot Springs. It was perfectly located in terms of the market, but it was a horrible site for development. It had unstable bedrock and was really hilly with springs on site. That was in the late ‘90s and at that time, just the site work for the project, not including any of the buildings, was more than $8 million, which was outrageous. I started thinking just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. That’s what motivated me to go back to grad school. I got a master’s in geography and a doctorate in environmental dynamics. I was looking at the use of geospatial technologies in environmental planning.
About the time I was ABD (all but dissertation), a position came open with the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology (CAST). I applied and was hired. I worked for CAST for about 12 years as a research associate. Then, in 2018, I started worrying about the availability of funding. In a soft-funded research department like CAST, if you don’t have grants, you don’t have a job, and I was feeling restless. So, I went back to private practice for a while. I was working at a local engineering firm when the landscape architecture department at the Fay Jones School asked if I was interested in teaching as an adjunct. I taught a couple of courses for a year, and then I applied for a full-time position.
While I was at CAST, I collaborated a lot with the department. I worked with Kimball Erdman (professor) from 2012-2018 on the Rohwer Japanese internment camp projects, and whenever we applied for grants that had an education component, we would offer courses that were usually cross listed with landscape architecture. I taught several courses on integrating geospatial technologies into landscape applications. I have had this ongoing relationship with the department since I started here as a student in 1990.
What drew you to education?
I come from a long line of educators. I think everybody on both sides of my family has been involved in it in one form or fashion. Education was one of my primary roles when I was at CAST. I spent a good portion of the 12 years that I was there doing outreach at K-12 schools across the state, Oklahoma and Louisiana through the EAST Initiative, and I’m still involved with EAST. I have many years of experience in education, and it’s something that I really enjoy. I think once you reach a certain point in your career, you feel like you’ve gained some practical experience that you want to pass on and help prepare the next generation of students.
How do you incorporate your CAST experience?
There’s so much overlap between geography and landscape architecture, and environmental concerns. Even though my three degrees come from separate disciplines, they’re really not separate because they’re all concerned with spatial locations, relationships and patterns. Geospatial technologies provide a way of integrating all these different kinds of information in an organized and methodological way that centers around place and it provides a way to quantify some of the decisions that we are called on to make in our professional careers. GIS (Geographic Information System) is a tool. It’s a tool for gathering, mapping, and analyzing, and disseminating spatial data, which is what we do as landscape architects, too.
I think the big thing that I want students to get out of this is that it is a tool that they need to be conversant in. When I graduated from the program, CAD (computer-aided design) was just a bonus if you knew it. Now, it’s absolutely required. You have to graduate from the program knowing how to use CAD software. That’s a critical toolset that our students need to have. I think, eventually, it will get to the point that you have to have some basic GIS skills as well. Right now, it’s a nice bonus for students to have it.
What is GIS?
A geographic information system, or GIS, is basically spatial data that goes far beyond just being able to locate something. There are actual databases behind every spatial location that reveal information that goes beyond the geometries of it, how big it is, and how large it is. That enables us to look for spatial patterns that inform the design process.
How has the average person run across this?
If you’ve ever used Google Maps to find directions from one place to another space, you’ve used geospatial information. The reason that application can give you turn-by-turn directions is because somebody has put together a data set for all of the roads in the United States with the length of the segment, the addresses that are associated with each line segment, the speed limit, and the ways that the road networks are connected.
What is something about your job that people may not realize?
As an educator, I think that students often don’t understand the amount of time and emotional energy that we invest in preparing for classes and thinking about how we’re presenting information to make sure they understand it. They also don’t always realize how invested we are in their success. From a landscape architecture standpoint, we still battle the misconception of what landscape architects are, and what they can do.
Where does that misconception stem from?
I think part of it is that people hear the word “landscape,” and they think that we are just landscape designers. I think part of it is also, that Arkansas is still largely a rural state, and it’s hard to know something that you have never seen. I am on the exam writing committee for the Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards (CLARB), which is responsible for organizing, structuring and administrating our national registration exam. Our national exam is administered three times throughout the year, and at any administration, we generally fall between 200 and 400 people registering to sit for the exam. That’s across both the United States and Canada. As a profession, we are really small. We don’t have the presence on a national level that architects and engineers do. It’s an ongoing issue. We don’t have a high professional profile, and that’s true across very broad geographic scales, and we’re actively working to change that.
Part of it is also that landscape architecture defies easy categorization. We have people who become planners. We have people who become golf course designers. We have people who specialize in residential design. We have people who specialize even further and become fountain designers or lighting designers. There are so many things that are landscape architecture adjacent that I don’t think you can categorize any one group of landscape architects. They don’t all do the same thing. I think the fact that we are so broad contributes to the lack of understanding of what landscape architecture is.
It’s not just “landscape” and “architecture.” You can’t separate the terms and really understand what we do.
How do you confront these misconceptions in the classroom?
We talk about it with students all the time. We tell them that they are going to have to continuously educate clients, other professionals and the public about who they are and what they can do.
They are aware of it, but it is a long-running frustration. Because it’s not just the public, many of our allied professionals don’t understand our skillsets and think that we’re just plant people. And even then, they’ll try to tell us what plants we need to use. I ran into that in a project just a couple of years ago. The architect was telling me what plants they wanted in a location, and I was like, “No, you don’t. If you try to put them there, they will die. They will not survive in those conditions.” But they want to argue with you about it.
What is the most difficult part of your job?
I think the most difficult part of being a landscape architect is the constant educational component. Making people aware of what our skillsets are. Often landscape architects are brought in at the end to pick out a plant palette and create a planting design, when they should be an integral part of the whole design process. It’s a challenge.
What is the best part?
As a landscape architect, when you have a finished project, you get to see people using it and enjoying it. As a professor, the best part of the job is watching my students go on and become successful: watching that growth and watching them achieve. We want our students to go further than we did, so watching them go and do great things is awesome.
Because we are a small profession, that means we are really connected. We have opportunities to help our students in their career paths. As an example, I had a student who expressed they wanted to go work in this particular state. They had visited it, and it was a region where they really wanted to live. When I was at CLARB a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting at lunch with a landscape architect who happened to practice in that state. I brought their business card home with me and passed it on to this student. Now they have a connection to a place that they ultimately want to be. That’s a lot of fun, being able to make those connections.
What is an accomplishment that you are proud of?
When I look back on my accomplishments, I think about how much help I had to get there. I think we default to these milestones that people mark, like educational accomplishments or achievements that look good on your resume. But, honestly, the accomplishments that I’m most proud of are the relationships I’ve built over the years and that those have been ongoing. You look at any of my accomplishments, and there is no way I could have finished them without a strong network. I couldn’t have raised my kids or finished any of my degrees without lots of support. I think personal relationships are the thing I am most proud of.