Throughout the 2023-24 academic year, Cite Design had the delight of volunteering with Henrico County Public Schools (HCPS) students in the Landscaping Course at the Advanced Career Education Center at Virginia Randolph (ACE). The Landscaping class focuses on preparing students for opportunities and advancement in the landscape design, construction, and maintenance industries. Working in partnership with Horticulture teacher and course instructor, Heather Veneziano, Cite Design prepared a series of lesson plans to showcase what landscape architecture is, explore related professions, and walk through the design process. The class then visited other sites around Richmond to apply the landscape design concepts taught by Cite Design and prepare for their primary course project.

Students had the opportunity to learn through a hands-on process and wrapped up the school year with presentations of their final schematic designs to representatives from Henrico County Public Schools, Henrico County Planning Department, ACE leadership, the Virginia Randolph Foundation, and Cite Design teammates Jon Hershey, Amelia Powers, and Sonakshi Gambhir. In addition to their final schematic design plans, the student’s final presentations included their vision, goals, and objectives for their site, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats) and site photos, a collection of inspiration images, plant palettes, lighting options, and site furnishings. Cite Design is so proud of the accomplishments that the students made and wish them the best in their journeys in the landscape industry!

The ACE Center at Virginia Randolph is undergoing a campus-wide renovation, which presented a unique opportunity for students to gain real-world application of their course work and directly impact the future design of the campus. Each student was given a portion of the redesigned campus to take from project initiation through schematic design. Cite Design walked students through background and analysis, inspiration and programming, preliminary design, and schematic design. Students gained an understanding of the iterative process of design and what it means to design an intentional landscape that will enhance the campus experience for current and future ACE students.

In addition to sharing our own landscape site design process, our team from Cite Design helped connect the students with professionals in related disciplines to expand their understanding of comprehensive design. We connected the class with our colleagues in the fields of lighting and architecture. The students learned about lighting best practices from Ben Oberhand of Lighting Environments, and Johanna Scogin, AIA of Cornerstone Architecture taught the class about LEED standards.