15 of the Best Instagram Accounts for Landscape Architects

Instagram is a great way to get inspired, but there are over 500 million active accounts, so who should you follow? For landscape architects, fresh ideas can be found from following other landscape architects, but also those outside the field: artists, technologists, illustrators, and designers. Here are a few of my favorite Instagram accounts, which offer unique imagery and perspectives.

Please use the comments section to let us know other Instagram accounts you enjoy.

Aerial Aesthetics

Drone photographers (see above) are just starting to test the medium. Aerial Aesthetics provides a steady stream of some of the best images this technology has to offer.

Beeple

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EASY LIFE #c4d #cinema4d #3d #gold

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The worst thing you can say about Beeple, AKA Mike Winkleman is that some of his work is derivative. But that’s inevitable when you’ve created a new piece of art everyday for the last 3,400 days and counting. Beeple’s “every days” have inspired many. Some of his recent work shows a fascination with vast, arid landscapes.

Curiosity Rover

The best Instagram account to follow for photos of the gorgeous Martian landscape is NASA’s, whose Curiosity Rover is currently exploring the base of Mt. Sharp, an 18,000 foot peak rising up out of a 96 mile-wide crater.

Gmunk

Bradley Munkowitz, AKA Gmunk, is a boundary-pushing digital artist, videographer, and photographer. His current series of infrared landscape photos is breathtaking, and he also has a great eye for patterns, textures, and materials.

Inhabitat Design

This account offers eco-architecture renderings and interior design photos, with some great landscape design mixed in.

Landscape Architecture

https://www.instagram.com/p/73yyuOyOCp/?taken-by=landscape.architecture

A good compilation of images of modern and classic landscape design.

Master Landscapers Association

Master Landscapers Association offers some examples of modern landscape design that most people may not otherwise come across. Plenty of Australian flora and construction process photos, too.

Night Photography

Nighttime photography is extremely challenging, but offers great creative opportunities. The Night Photography account consolidates the most creative, dramatic nighttime shots into one feed, giving many perspectives on life in the dark.

Oehme van Sweden

Oehme van Sweden is one of the few landscape architecture firms to curate a compelling Instagram account. Vivid photos of plantings, works in progress, life around the office, and a fairly regular output of new content, make this feed stand out.

Katie Orlinsky

Photojournalist Katie Orlinsky captures everyday life, focusing on marginalized communities. Her recent series of photos from Alaska shows how integral the land and sea are to everyday life.

Pangaea Express

Eric Arneson, who curates Pangaea Express, is a landscape designer who uses Instagram well. A great mix of process photos, drawing details, photos from the field, final renderings, and all with a good dose of experimentation.

Konsta Punkka

Finnish photographer Konsta Punkka describes himself as the squirrel whisperer. His photos of Scandinavian wildlife are startling because of the close proximity of his subjects. His photos of the landscape are equally striking.

Urban Nation Berlin

There are some great Instagram feeds featuring street art. The Museum for Urban Contemporary Art curates one of the better ones. Edgy, often disturbing murals and installations.

Danielle Villisana

Another photojournalist, Danielle Villisana, offers snapshots of life from global cities.

Tyson Wheatley

There are plenty of great professional photographers on Instagram. Tyson Wheatley’s account stands out for his incredible compositional skills and use of light.

Also, be sure to check out American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)’s account, too.

A New Look at the Trail Blazing David Williston

David A. Williston / TCLF
David A. Williston / TCLF


David August Williston
is a name little known today, even in the world of landscape architecture. But according to Dr. Douglas Williams, Student ASLA, Ph.D graduate from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, he is one of the trail blazers of the field. One of the first African American landscape architects, Williston designed some of the major campuses of historically African American colleges like Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and Howard University in Washington, D.C. In his lifetime, he never experienced full integration, having passed away in 1962 at the age of 94, but managed to accomplish a lasting legacy of built work.

In a talk at Howard University’s School of Architecture, Williams wondered why Williston is so little celebrated. In part, he blames the lack of diversity in core landscape architecture texts, like the Landscape of Man, published in 1970, and Landscape Design, in 2001. “Where are the black people in these texts?”

He also pointed to the paucity of published books on African American cultural landscapes. Celebrated African American landscape architect Walter Hood, ASLA, published a book of his own work, but that was back in 1997. (Apparently, he is at work on a second book on his “hybrid landscapes”). The 2004 book African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945, an overview of some 100 designers, includes only 5-6 landscape architects. Williams bemoaned that mainstream attention to these designers only gets paid in a cursory fashion during Black History Month.

Williams highlighted a few examples of what he considers to be excellent African American scholarship on landscape: from J.B. Jackson’s The Necessity of Ruins and Other Topics, which states that “the garden landscapes of blacks are some of the least known and richest,” to We Shall Independent Be: African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States, a compendium edited by Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander, which explores the stories of African American communities displaced by Frederick Law Olmsted in the creation of Central Park.

Referring to Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, which argues that geniuses are less isolated phenomena than important nodes in deep and rich social networks, Williams argued that Williston also collaborated widely. He tried to imagine Williston’s African American contemporaries, many of whom remain unknown. He tried to imagine how Williston was able to create an entirely African American system to achieve his landscape designs in the segregated deep South. And he tried to imagine how Williston, without access to white-owned nurseries, could have sought out native plants in the woods and cultivated them on his own. (Williston was one of the first African Americans to earn a bachelor’s degree in horticulture from Cornell University; there, his love of plants grew into a considerable expertise on plant propagation and cultivation.)

Williston taught horticulture to African American college students while also serving as a campus landscape architect for numerous historically black colleges. He spent 20 years at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, where he also worked with African American architect Robert R. Taylor to lay out the physical campus. According to The Cultural Landscape Foundation, he then settled in Washington, D.C. at the onset of the Great Depression, where he started his own firm. He designed the expansion of Howard University, and numerous other colleges, working well into his early 90s.

Williams’ hope is to completely digitize Williston’s archives and make them accessible online for future researchers, using them as a basis to create 3-D models of now-lost planting schemes, so more people can experience a Williston landscape.