2025 Pulse Check: Business Strategies and Market Shifts in Landscape Architecture - 1.0 PDH (LA CES/non-HSW)

Timothy A. Schuler is an award-winning writer and design critic whose work focuses on the intersection of the built and natural environments. He is an editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine and a critic-in-residence in landscape architecture at Places Journal. His writing also regularly appears in Metropolis, Bloomberg CityLab, The Architect’s Newspaper, and FLUX Hawaiʻi, among other outlets.His essay, “The Middle of Everywhere,” about the largest remaining expanse of tallgrass prairie in North America, was included on a list of the most notable science and nature writing in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020. He lives in Manhattan, Kansas.

L. Irene Compadre, PLA is the Founding Principal & Design Director of Arbolope Studio, an award-winning Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Public Art practice based in St. Louis, MO. An experimental firm that prioritizes high-quality design, ecological resillience, and social-equity; Arbolope’s work ranges from intimate public spaces such as Strauss Park in St. Louis, to large scale masterplans including for the Universidad Technical in Loja, Ecuador and the Jefferson City Botanical Garden in Missouri's capital city. Irene holds a MLA from Washington University in St. Louis where she now teaches in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Kenneth Francis is a founding principal of Surroundings, a New Mexico based landscape architecture and planning studio. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from The Cooper Union in New York City and a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. While studying at Harvard, he was awarded a travel grant to research the historic and cultural landscape of the acequias in Northern New Mexico. His dedication to complex dialogue and deep exploration around issues of water and its integration into innovative design responses has resulted in an exceptional body of work that is celebrated and studied both regionally and nationally. 

Ashley Ludwig is the founder of ABLE, a landscape architecture practice based in Seattle dedicated to cultivating resilient, meaningful spaces alongside communities. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in landscape architecture and architecture, Ashley cares deeply about everyday spaces in rural and urban communities and their potential to reflect and uplift the people that inhabit them. With an engaging design approach and passion for craft, Ashley brings people into the design process to transform sites into active, beloved public spaces. Her work has received awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects and American Institute of Architects.

Stacy Passmore is a principal and co-founder of Superbloom in Denver, Colorado. Her work explores field-based methods of design research, understanding environments and communities are deeply dynamic and require designs that engage with conditions of change. Working at multiple scales of reading and representing landscapes, Stacy’s recent projects focus on the resiliency of arid landscapes and the potential for design approaches that reconsider the relationships between humans and ecological systems. Stacy holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University, a Master of Community and Regional Planning from the University of British Columbia, and a B.A. from New York University.