All OLIN Labs initiatives fall within one of three divisions, depending on whether they are internally-focused efforts to capture and build knowledge (Education), focused on the design and development of tools and methods to improve practice (Development), or outwardly-facing collaborative projects meant to create new knowledge, drive the broader field of landscape architecture and affect positive societal and environmental change (Research.)
Knowledge building and knowledge sharing have always been core to OLIN’s practice. OLIN Labs ensures that all OLIN projects have access to and reflect that best, most current design and analysis practices. Labs members plan and present office-wide lectures and training sessions, while maintaining physical and digital knowledge resources such as our material library and online Knowledge Base.
Central to OLIN Labs is creating and sharing resources for internal OLIN use. This is done primarily on I/O, (formerly Knowledge Base (KB)). An internal sharing platform, I/O was developed in 2023 to catalog and store OLIN’s in-house knowledge. I/O is a tool for evidence-based design and serves as a repository of the deep knowledge that is created and collected through project work. A place for knowledge collection, and distribution, I/O makes our institutional knowledge accessible to all OLIN designers.
OLIN's library and archival collections house drawings and materials spanning OLIN’s 40 years of practice. Holding over 7,000 items in the collection. 4,300 of these are print items (books, periodicals, exhibition catalogs, over-sized items, special collections, etc.) of which 1,700 have been donated from Laurie Olin’s personal collection. The collection also includes approximately 1,800 tubes of landscape architecture drawings. A conservative estimate of 20 drawings per tube would mean that OLIN's archives hold 36,000 drawings representing decades of work. The remaining materials in our collection include OLIN's masterplans, compiled historical research, and half-sized sets.
While capturing and sharing existing knowledge is essential to sustaining a thriving landscape practice, rapid changes in technology provide new ways to thrive through enhanced process. The Development Division of Labs designs tools and methods to improve workflows across our office. From coding of custom software to the definition of workflows and alignment of assets, we are in the practice of capturing process-specific knowledge to enhance our work. The design process is sometimes messy and non-deterministic. Having portable workflows and tools at the ready, allows us to dig through messy design problems and production tasks much more quickly. In this way we can spend more time answering bigger questions and refining our decisions to a higher level of fidelity.
Our goal is to make the hard stuff easier, so that we can get to the stuff that truly impacts people and the planet through inspiring design.
Often, the most urgent issues facing our field fall outside of the boundaries of project work. OLIN Labs’ Research Division takes on both project-driven and purpose-driven initiatives that require primary and secondary research and that often rely on external partnerships and collaborations. Our aim is to improve our practice and that of allied professionals and to drive positive transformation in cities and landscapes.
Our research partners include academic, government and non-profit institutions and research centers. As a conduit between academia and practice, Labs’ Research Division has partnered with Penn’s McHarg Center for Ecology and Urbanism, the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Sustainability, and Penn’s Masters in Environmental Studies Department to offer practice-based research experience to graduate and undergraduate students.
