A practice’s digital toolkit is typically populated with the offerings of software giants, such as Autodesk, Adobe and Nemetschek. While some practices might engage specialists to build new tools to fill in the gaps, these efforts typically remain proprietary. But what if landscape architects’ design software was made by other landscape architects? Philip Belesky spoke to two practising landscape architects who make software and release their tools into the wild: Thomas Chapman, computational design lead at McGregor Coxall, and Niki Schwabe, a director of both landscape architecture practice Bush Projects and Doco Lab, a sibling company to Bush that was created to develop and sell software for landscape architects.
Philip Belesky – Niki, Doco Lab is preparing to release a mix of paid and free software. Thomas, you released LandArchTools in 2021. What do each of these toolkits offer and how did they come about?
They’re essentially a family of tools that operate in Rhino. Development and live project testing
