Come join our team in 2019! From Activating Alleys to Connecting Downtown and Deep Ellum, our internship program gets you face to face with real clients, exposure to a variety of projects, participation in site visits, and welcomes you to Outsider life.

Every year Studio Outside facilitates an office-wide retreat with the goal of engaging Outsiders at every experience level. A collaborative internal team addresses the retreat by creating a theme that relates to the office-wide culture, mission, and vision. This year’s theme: creativity.

2017 was the inaugural year of the Studio Outside Internship Project. Four interns (Ann, Vanessa, Chandler, and Lu Rui) explored ways to activate spaces under the I-345 freeway that are currently dark, dangerous and difficult to navigate. They designed and discovered ways to turn these underpasses into usable public space. This year we explored something different in Deep Ellum: alleys.

This fall we hosted the second Outside Studio Sounds, our annual effort to explore and inspire new forms of music + creativity.  Joined by friends, we convened for a night of music, art, and refreshments. Our goal was to see what connections could be made through a joyful and unique sonic evening. Not your typical rock-n-roll show and certainly not a typical office event, Outside Studio Sounds is about creating an experience we can use music as inspiration in our work and life. 

There is within all of us, I think, a desire to rekindle our historic relationship with nature: a functioning piece, rather than a ruler. To journey to remote places that remind us of the scale of our cosmos, and to humble us with ancient architecture that has moved and adapted, and still stands. Or doesn't. It's an ongoing, evolving spectrum of cause and effect, manifesting in a continual state of entropy... This is the allure of the west. 

This year has been a year of changes within the internship program at Studio Outside – both within the organizational structure and the size of the program, with this year being the largest at four interns. Representing three states and four schools, this gave us the opportunity to design in an office setting, work together as young professionals, and present to real clients.

Thirty days, four sheets of plywood, six piano hinges and five landscape architects. The result: a replicable, easily assembled, deconstructable, and shippable shade structure endearingly referred to as the “Cootie Catcher,” which took home the Best in Show and People’s Choice awards at Field Day 2017 last month.

For many, Landscape Architecture is a profession stumbled upon or a career pursued only by an artistic few. It is an idea which seems unknown, unfamiliar, or possibly even strange. But I would like to let it be known, Landscape Architecture is not meant to be understood by a select group; rather, it is meant to be experienced by all.

Landscape Architecture is a moment many have lived and felt, it is an instant many have seen and heard. It is a drive on the street, a run on the trail, a rest on the patio, a swim on the rooftop, a picnic in the park, a stroll through the plaza; in conclusion, it is the outdoor experience. It creates spaces that capture minds and intensify emotions; it forms places which encourage people to sit and stay, or to run and explore.

As landscape architects, it’s always interesting to hear what people think our profession is about. Usually, people think of landscape architects as either gardeners, landscapers, arborists, or florists. The truth is that we do have knowledge of a wide variety of plants, but knowing about plants and trees is only a small part of what a landscape architect actually does daily.

As an example, I was recently asked about a tree problem in a friend’s garden. Luckily, I could answer the question but only because I’ve seen a lot of tree issues in 35+ years of practicing landscape architecture. Learning about tree or plant problems has been a necessity because it really is more of a test question: answer correctly and you’re an expert, answer incorrectly and your clients will know more than you do. Ouch.

A normal week at Studio Outside involves a lot of drawing and design, client meetings, site visits, and guiding the construction of landscape architecture projects all around the country. But every once in a while, we get the opportunity to impact our community in Dallas not just by designing something, but by building it with our own hands. 

Last month, Outsiders gathered at a south Dallas home to partner with the Hearts & Hammers organization, whose mission is to refurbish qualified homes owned by low income citizens within the Dallas Metroplex, in renovating the outside of the home.

Reimagine Crowdus is a month-long temporary public space along Crowdus Street in Deep Ellum, intended to serve as a quick and cost-effective experiment to determine the public space needs within the community. For the month of September, Crowdus Street has been transformed into a new pedestrian plaza offering a variety of seating, street trees for shade, a cool new shade structure designed by Gensler, and an art installation gateway designed by Design Future Dallas. Throughout the month of September, free events such as concerts and outdoor movies are helping activate the space and serving as an example of what the space could eventually become.

We’re back from the 4-day 2016 Texas ASLA conference, hosted by our neighbors in Fort Worth this year. In between the multitude of innovative and interesting vendors on the conference floor, and the wide range of lectures (one by Studio Outside Principal Tary Arterburn), the 2016 Awards were given out during a luncheon, and Studio Outside was fortunate enough to come home with a few!

Studio Outside and more than 3,000 other design professionals attended this year’s Texas Society of Architects 76th Annual Convention and Design Expo at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center this month focusing on one theme: stories.

With more than 90 continuing education sessions, more than 30 architectural tours, 300 booths and two keynote speakers, the event offered architects and architecture professionals a chance to regenerate and find inspiration in three high-energy days focused on stories that build environments, said Tod Stehling, Expo and Development Director at the Texas Society of Architects