Genesis 3 has entered into an affiliate sponsorship agreement with the Association of Professional Landscape Designers.
The two groups will sponsor, promote and present seminars at each other’s events.
The APLD will make a showing for the pool and spa industry at the International Pool|Spa|Patio Expo in New Orleans, where representatives will hold two one-hour seminars under the Genesis 3 umbrella — one addressing landscape design around waterfeatures, and the other discussing the patio environment. They will be held at the Genesis 3 Lifestyle booth Wednesday, Nov. 6.
Genesis 3 is expected to make presentations at future APLD events.
“The more we are educated in the same thought process, the stronger we’re all going to be,” said Colleen Hamilton, APLD’s national sponsorship chair.
“We don’t even know where this could go, but it could become something where we really feed each other,” added Hamilton, who also is a landscape designer and owner of Bloomin’ Landscape Designs in Carmichael, Calif.
Genesis 3 also made an appearance at the American Society of Landscape Architects’ annual meeting in late September. Genesis 3 co-founders Brian Van Bower and Skip Phillips, along with its Educational Committee chairman, David Peterson, joined forces with Eric Groft of the renowned landscape architecture firm Oehme van Sweden to address how to design state-of-the-art waterfeatures.
“I think water is one of the most important elements in the garden in landscape architecture,” said Groft, principal and vice president of Washington, D.C.-based Oehme, Van Sweden. “And oftentimes we as landscape architects may have a vision, but we’re not exactly sure how to best get it built or design it. And that’s why you bring in professionals like Genesis 3.”
Genesis 3 expects future collaborations with the landscape architects group. “We’ve known [ASLA] for some time and have been members for some time, but we haven’t done a program in a while and now I think it’s likely we will be doing more,” Van Bower said.
Groft sees the value of continuing with such collaborations — both in the class and in the field. “My point [in the session] was it kind of takes a village — it takes landscape architects, pool consultants and engineers to put award-wining projects together,” he said. “We’ve all seen our fair share of waterfeatures, and even swimming pools sometimes, that get filled in because they weren’t done properly. So it’s a collaboration between design professionals and engineers and the client that makes a project special and long-lasting.”
Genesis 3 has always maintained memberships with both landscape groups and has seen participation by that industry as well, with an estimated 10- to 20 percent of its students coming from the landscape design and landscape architecture fields, Van Bower said.
“I think that many landscape designers and landscape architects ... perhaps have found that a lot of the industry had very little interest in design and they weren’t able to communicate on the same level, and so they’ve been disappointed,” Van Bower said. “I think [these affiliations] go a long way toward repairing that, by them seeing people who are interested in design and working in a team environment.”
