Joseph Brooks - Land Collective Blog #2

 Land Collective: Arts + Technicality

2.6.2026

Life goes on at Land Collective. This winter is a cold one - Philadelphia has been receiving truckloads of snow, overwhelming its plowing faculties. I'm lucky enough to be located near one of the more reliable forms of public transit, but my car is snowed in for now (along with most of the city's buses). This hasn't clipped my wings, however. I'm getting out and about in my own neighborhood, exploring the urban condition of West Philadelphia. My latest expeditions have included mural-spotting trips (Philly has a vibrant history of graffiti and street art) down Lancaster Avenue and chilly visits to view collections of Shaker-inspired modernist furniture at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Ref. 1 Mural off Lancaster Avenue.

Ref. 2 Shaker religious glyph. Do you see the hints of Bauhaus geometry?

I am thankful to be working in such a warm, busy studio. As efforts on the Wilmington Riverfront Masterplan implementation have wound down, I have pivoted projects and am now working on construction documents for the landscape surrounding the Elkridge Community Center in Howard County, MD. This project has documentation requirements that are far from standard, allowing me to flex my BIM and data-wrangling muscles. Most of these requirements stem from the rigorous permitting process that our project team is navigating. Throughout the design process, we have approached the landscape from a native-heavy lens, blending into the surrounding hilly topography through densified planting. Our planting design also has to meet county requirements for specific buffer conditions, imposing additional constraints. Working on this project has helped me to better understand how to develop (and navigate, for that matter) a construction drawing set in its entirety in a clean, concise way. My AutoCAD chops are certainly improving - I have had to leverage the full power of named groups, conditional property filters, dynamic blocks, and even parametric AutoLISP scripting to make efficient edits to drifts of perennials and their associated soil types in our drawing set. 

I feel a strong sense of ownership when I flip through our plotsheets. I'm getting to dive into details that we don't have time/capacity to explore in school. Each 6-hour bollard layout study reminds me that there is more to design than seductive renders and slick masterplans, and it's exciting to work on aspects of a project that users will experience more tangibly. I'm sure that further development of the construction set will test my patience, but I'm excited to continue working on this project, and I hope to visit it when it gets built.

Ref. 3 Retaining wall studies and a cortado.

I'm also working on some more graphics-heavy assignments, but I must keep details to a minimum due to potential sensitivity surrounding the projects. I've been working on 3D models (hello, Blender) and renderings for Land Collective's New Plan for Pennsylvania Avenue, a typology-based investigation of the eponymous nationally significant corridor in Washington, DC. I'm also working with a bevy of point cloud data to construct a hyper-accurate model of remnant rail infrastructure as part of an unannounced adaptive reuse project here in Philadelphia. I will keep you all posted as more details go public.

Ref. 4 The studio at night.

I appreciate the cool weather at night when I leave the studio, as it helps my brain cool down from the busy days. In all seriousness, I am deeply appreciative of the way my mentors have allowed me to dig into projects past the concept and schematic stages. I truly feel like I am beginning to understand what it takes to be a practitioner of built design, and how my more heady academic tendencies could fit into those demands.

I'm excited to see where my projects go. Bye for now.