Last fall, Kirk Bereuter, PLA, ASLA, CLARB, ISA, shared his perspective on the normalization of certain forms of elitism within landscape architecture, specifically the perceived superiority of "visionaries" over those with developed technical skills. Here, Bereuter shares his journey into landscape architecture, a reflection on cultural hurdles within the profession, and personal insight on the role Artificial Intelligence has and can have without replacing practitioners.

Artistic Foundations
Creative play and "making" were things I gravitated toward from the very beginning - being placed in a highchair with crayons, building go-carts or tree houses from a very young age, and spending hours on end inventing futuristic, multi-modal vehicles assembled from plasticene, Legos, and whatever else I could get my hands on. My mother never directed specific creative tasks for me to do; instead, she facilitated by providing materials and opportunity for free-form play, drawing, building, and experimenting. Born in 1975, I grew up in an era when my brother, friends, and I were largely free-range in our activities and creative play. Even as the son of a congressman, we were latchkey kids who rode the school bus home and were on our own until our parents returned from work. I think that combination of freedom and trust cultivated independence, free-form thinking, and problem-solving early on. By the time I reached high school and finally took an art elective with my mother as the teacher, I had already internalized many of the creative principles being taught. She did, however, push me to take life-drawing classes, which I begrudgingly went to. In hindsight, those classes helped me develop a portfolio that ultimately served as a parachute when applying to top-tier art schools.

Up until the middle of high school, I wasn't a particularly focused student. I spent far too much time staring out the classroom window daydreaming about building things or drawing on my desk, much to the patient frustration of my parents as they repeatedly reminded me to complete and turn in assignments. Just before I left home for the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI), my mother sat me down and warned me that art school was no joke - a professor could remove you from a class if you showed up late or didn't meet expectations. Until then, I had always been the "star" of the art class, but at KCAI I quickly realized that they had gathered stars from all over the country into one building. That realization - along with the fear of being left behind or kicked out at the drop of a hat - lit a fire under me. Discipline and consistency became habits, and that shift fundamentally shaped the rest of my career.

The Shift Towards Landscape
Aside from free-form outdoor play as a young child, I developed a love for camping, survival techniques, and outdoor recreation. I spent countless spring, summer, and fall seasons in the mountains of West Virginia at a place called Twin Mountain, where there was no light pollution and no one for miles around. Most of this massive acreage was meadow and woodland, used primarily for raising cattle within cordoned-off fields adjacent to small apple orchards. This landscape, combined with extreme topography, lent itself to countless opportunities for destination-style recreation. For grade-school Kirk, that meant The Legend of Zelda-inspired adventures and monster bonfires; for young-adult Kirk, it became a subconscious training ground for absorbing viewshed sequence, enclosure, perception, and human scale within a landscape that felt closer to a national park than a private property.

In late high school, I became aware of Earthworks artists like Andy Goldsworthy and had already fallen in love with that genre of sculpture before entering art school. During my sculpture studies, I was also struck by patterns in the landscape during walks from my apartment to the KCAI campus. There was the defined system laid down by sidewalks and streets and then there were the organic desire lines, where someone or something decided, "This is where I want to walk." These worn paths would hop from sidewalk planting strips to street medians and into broad expanses of turf, weaving their way through campus. I became fascinated by these parallel systems - formal and informal - coexisting within the same physical plane.

Then, at a key moment, my father - who had attended the Harvard GSD for urban planning - mentioned the institution's summer career discovery program in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. I applied to the landscape architecture session the summer after my junior year, and it was a major turning point in my life. I discovered a profession centered on creating an experience rather than singular objects, which aligned perfectly with my interest in earthworks and landscape-scale sculpture. Coincidentally, Kate Orff, PLA, FASLA, was my studio instructor during her final graduate year before entering practice.

Discipline Bridging Disciplines
When I was a sculpture major in my undergraduate studies at KCAI, there was a very rigorous focus on intelligent investigation in the development of your work - how any progression or family of pieces came forward, as well as the creative vocabulary you develop as a result of the creative process. Whether the work was more formal or more conceptual in nature, it was expected that there be an intelligent rationale and logic behind the specific materials, form, and symbolism employed, why they were chosen, and the inherent thought, cultural, and/or personal impact they would have on a viewer. Were you achieving what you set out to do with the choices made, and was that specific medium appropriate for investigating the variety of concepts you chose to explore?

 

I remember chatting with my roommate, an industrial design major, who said something I would later find to be somewhat prophetic as I transitioned into the design realm: "A sculptor should be a good designer, and a designer should be a good sculptor." The conceptual rigor and discipline demanded in the sculpture department transferred quite readily and shrewdly into the design realm of landscape architecture, in the rawest and purest sense. Instead of producing a body of sculptural work driven solely by my own internal stimulus and gratification, my work as a Landscape Architect entails establishing a relationship with my clients and getting to know who they are as individuals or as a group. Unlike my work as a sculptor, the study of my client, their specific site environment, the surrounding context, and the desired program informs and provides the external stimulus from which the character of the design takes shape. The narrative that emerges, whether personal or cultural, is driven by creative dialogue and excavation. The resulting design becomes an act of giving form, description, and name to the intangible.

Encountering Elitism in the Profession
While art school was freeing and formative, it was also my first real encounter with a subtle kind of gatekeeping, where assumptions about origin began to shape perceptions of belonging. Graduate school introduced another layer of complexity. I was one of only two men in a starting class of twelve, and ultimately the only man in our graduating cohort of seven. Class background didn't feel like a defining fault line at that stage - most of us, regardless of upbringing, were taking on significant student debt to be there - but I did become more aware of how gender dynamics and assumptions could quietly shape how people interpreted effort, feedback, or success. I've also observed that a significant portion of students entering MLA and BLA programs come from families with enough financial stability to weather the cost of education and the early years of practice. Even so, many students across a wide range of backgrounds carry substantial student debt to obtain their degrees. The cost of education, the time required to establish a practice, and the cultural familiarity often expected within the profession still present real barriers. Ultimately, despite scholarship programs and outreach initiatives, I don't believe landscape architecture is yet as accessible as it could be - particularly for individuals from lower-income backgrounds, regardless of race.

In professional practice, I've generally experienced respectful and fair treatment across firm sizes and settings. Any sense of being "inside" or "outside" professional circles has tended to surface more subtly - through occasional shifts in perception, or assumptions about competence. Over time, I learned that credibility in this profession is ultimately built through doing the work well, showing up consistently, and letting the quality of your thinking and execution speak louder than background, identity, or perception. That realization has grounded how I move through professional circles today - with less concern about whether I'm inside or outside them, and more focus on contributing meaningfully once I'm there.

The Newest Hurdle: AI
Over the past 15 years as a solo practitioner, I've thought about how specific projects or workload could justify hiring staff, and I would even worry about when or how that might be achieved by my small, shrewd design practice. When I started hearing whispers of AI, I didn't pay much attention to it, at first. As time progressed, I began to feel a more adversarial and antagonistic attitude toward it, thinking that it couldn't possibly replace me. Recently, I've started fielding questions more like, "Are you seeing the impact of AI on your profession?" and "Is AI starting to replace your work as a Landscape Architect?" My typical response - and the sense I still have now - is that creative work that requires tapping into the soul of a client and the intangible list of ideas floating around in their head while navigating turbulent client social dynamics and sorting through ever-changing preferences still necessitates sitting face-to-face with a human in order to truly understand who they are and to thereby answer the bigger questions of the design challenge. As a creative person, I have a sense for how a firm might develop methods for an AI design service, but I won't offer any clues or ideas here to help AI developers replace an entire creative class.

On the positive side, I reluctantly checked out an AI system at the good-humored prodding of an old friend, thinking I would look at it briefly on a desktop and certainly wouldn't download the app for fear that it might harvest my data. After giving it a test task - something relatively time-consuming, tedious, and complex - it was able to crank out what would have taken me two weeks to a month in about five seconds. Needless to say, I downloaded the app, paid for the base subscription, and now see it as an irreplaceable, indispensable assistant that can - based on the task - do the work of ten people. I've heard that Landscape Architects have twenty more years before we're replaced. I, however, am not worried and see AI - at least for now - as more of an assistant.

At this moment, AI is like a pencil: the lines that come out of a pencil can produce a work of art or something mundane with no content, depending on who is holding it. While I've heard horror stories about graphic design firms losing business due to AI, I also don't believe that - at this point - an everyday person with no design background would be able to ChatGPT their way through an advanced design project without solid education and design principles guiding thoughtful input. That path would likely result in frustration, hair-pulling, and eventually picking up the phone to call a designer to fix the work - and at significant cost in order to undo and redo the haphazard, ad-hoc design and construction decisions made along the way.

AI does, however, have huge potential in filling knowledge and information gaps where one might lack expertise, but I don't foresee it deepening the elitism divide. Rather, I see it as a tool to bolster all aspects of design and administrative work, from SD/concept/visioning through CA. AI can currently help people who lack technical ability beef up their skills and may, in the future, significantly automate portions of that work. That said, I don't think AI will replace the need for professionals in our realm to possess a solid design foundation, nor will it compensate for a lack of design skill, talent, or ability. Someone with strong creative ability and a solid set of design principles still needs to guide and "babysit" AI.

Humanity is Irreplaceable
While artificial intelligence will increasingly assist parts of landscape architecture, the most important aspects of the profession remain deeply human. We don't design for abstract inputs; we design for people, communities, and places. A human practitioner can sit across from a client and intuit what isn't being said: the anxieties behind the budget, the personal history tied to a site, the maintenance realities, the emotional stakes. That kind of understanding isn't data-driven; it's empathetic, interpretive, and built on trust.

Landscape architecture is also inseparable from physical presence and lived experience. Being on a site reveals things that don't translate cleanly into models or prompts, like the way water actually moves after a storm, how people ignore paths they don't like, where sun and wind truly land, or how a place feels at different times of the day and year. AI can analyze information, but it doesn't stand in the mud, notice patterns of use, or sense subtle cues that often guide the best decisions. Creativity in practice isn't just about generating ideas - it's about judgment under constraint. The real work happens when a concept must survive permits, value engineering, agency review, construction realities, and long-term maintenance. Knowing what to protect, what to compromise, and how to preserve intent through those pressures requires experience and discernment.

AI can produce options quickly, but it can't take responsibility for choices that affect safety, accessibility, ecology, or durability. Accountability and ethics remain human responsibilities. Landscape Architects sign drawings, carry licenses, and are accountable for outcomes that affect public health, safety, and welfare. AI doesn't hold professional risk, doesn't exercise moral judgment, and doesn't care whether a space ultimately serves people well. AI will undoubtedly become a useful tool, but the core of landscape architecture - empathy, site intuition, ethical judgment, and responsibility - still lives firmly with people.

Looking Forward
What makes me optimistic is that landscape architecture is increasingly being recognized not as a finishing layer, but as a central discipline regarding how communities function in a hotter, wetter, and more unpredictable world. Many of the challenges society is now forced to confront are issues Landscape Architects have been trained to address for decades. There's a growing alignment between what the world needs and what our profession does best. I also see a shift away from purely image-driven value toward performance-driven outcomes, where beauty is paired with measurable benefits like cooling neighborhoods, managing stormwater, restoring habitat, and delivering long-term economic and social value. That combination is encouraging agencies, allied professionals, and decision-makers to take Landscape Architects more seriously. I'm also encouraged by a renewed focus on advocacy, licensure, and public understanding of the profession. There's a clearer recognition that licensure protects public health, safety, and welfare, and that our value must be explained and cannot be assumed. At the same time, the profession is navigating new tools - including AI - with a growing consensus that technology should support and not replace human judgment, ethics, and site-based responsibility. Landscape architecture remains a deeply human practice, grounded in real places, real consequences, and professional accountability. If we continue to embrace that role - combining creativity with technical rigor and public responsibility - I think the profession is headed toward a stronger, more influential future, with a well-earned seat at the table.

Bringing It Home
My father has been present at several important moments in my professional life - placing a copy of the society's magazine on the coffee table when I was young, planting the seed of landscape architecture during art school, and later nudging me to pursue licensure and professional credentials. Growing up in a household shaped by his background - as an Army counterintelligence officer, urban planner, and congressman - meant being around organized, focused, serious, and disciplined thinking. Those traits didn't emerge immediately in me as a young creative, but they surfaced later at key moments in my career: when communicating with clients, organizing and managing projects, standing firm on important design issues, and learning when diplomacy mattered just as much as conviction. At the same time, watching my mother teach and produce her own art instilled a deep respect for unbridled creativity that isn't second-guessed before it has a chance to take shape. The foundation for the way I think about design, responsibility, and communication was laid in childhood and refined through professional practice where the balance between creative freedom and responsibility became not just theoretical, but necessary. My parents gave me the raw ingredients. The profession taught me how and when to use them.

If I could send one message to students and emerging professionals, it would be this: don't underestimate the power of being well-rounded. Landscape architecture lives at the intersection of art, science, ecology, engineering, and human behavior, and real influence comes from understanding how those pieces work together. Invest in the technical fundamentals - grading, drainage, detailing, construction documents, specifications, and how things actually get built. These skills don't limit creativity; they expand it. The designers who last are the ones who can carry an idea all the way from concept through construction and into the real world. I'd also encourage young professionals to stay grounded in curiosity, humility, and responsibility. This profession is ultimately about serving people and places, often over long timelines and through complex constraints. Go to the site. Pay attention. Learn how to listen carefully to clients and communities, and how to explain what you do clearly and confidently. New tools - including AI - will continue to change how we work, but they won't replace judgment, ethics, or accountability. Landscape architecture remains a deeply human practice, rooted in real places and real consequences. If you commit to learning the full scope of the profession and stay focused on its broader purpose, you'll build not just a career but work that genuinely matters.

About the Author
Kirk Bereuter, PLA, ASLA, CLARB, ISA, is the owner/founder of KBLA (Kirk Bereuter Landscape Architecture, LLC), a landscape architecture design firm founded in 2010 and located in Alexandria, Virginia. Some of his design work specialties include traditional landscape architecture projects within high-end residential, institutional, K-12, and agritourism, which have found recent publication within Landscape Architect & Specifier News (LASN) and Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM).