Site Engineering Handbook for Landscape Architects: Grading, Drainage, and Green Stormwater Infrastructure for Accessible, Code-Compliant Outdoor Spac

By John M. King

A plaza that reads level in a drawing can still fail an inspection. A walk that satisfies every dimension on paper can be torn out because its cross slope measures a fraction over the accessible limit. A stormwater feature sized to a permit number can stop working the week it opens, because the equipment that built it compacted the ground the water was supposed to enter.

These are not separate failures. They are one failure arriving from different directions: a design that treated grading, drainage, and accessibility as three tasks performed in sequence, when a single point on a drawing has to satisfy all three limits at once. Many standard references were written for an earlier version of this problem. Accessibility dimensions for public walkways were only finalized in the past few years, the federal manual behind urban drainage calculations has been reissued with a revised equation, and the rainfall statistics behind every "design storm" are being reconsidered. Stormwater regulation has shifted too, from matching predevelopment peak runoff to asking how much water leaves the site at all - a question increasingly answered by grading and soil rather than by pipe and pond, placing green stormwater infrastructure inside the grading discipline rather than beside it. And because most numeric limits are set by state and local rule rather than by any single national standard, knowing where to find the governing criteria matters as much as knowing the method.

This handbook works through grading, drainage, accessibility, and green stormwater infrastructure as one continuous design problem. It explains the reasoning behind each governing number and follows a single project across all sixteen chapters, so the consequences of an early decision stay visible in a later one, the way they do on an actual site.

Readers learn to: build and verify a digital terrain model from survey data; reconcile drainage, accessibility, and construction tolerance at a single spot elevation using a margin-based approach rather than designing to the legal limit; calculate earthwork volume and balance cut against fill; carry out rainfall, runoff, and conveyance calculations, including design-storm selection amid changing rainfall statistics; locate and apply the criteria that actually govern a given jurisdiction; size and grade bioretention areas, permeable paving, and other green stormwater practices, including the soil volume trees need beneath pavement; and assemble a construction-ready grading and drainage drawing set, carried through layout, field tolerance, and inspection.

Every method is developed with fully worked numerical examples, and each chapter closes with practice problems and a complete answer key - including, for some problems, a plausible but incorrect solution worked through and diagnosed. Chapter summaries and reference tables state which numbers are fixed nationally, which must be looked up locally, and which are simply convention, and a glossary and appendices extend the book's use as a standing desk reference.

Written for upper-level undergraduate and graduate landscape architecture students, for practicing designers updating their grading, drainage, and stormwater knowledge against recent regulatory and technical change, and for candidates preparing for professional licensure, for whom this content is a well-known obstacle. Readers are assumed to read a plan, use an engineer's scale, and follow arithmetic; no prior coursework in hydrology, hydraulics, or soil science is assumed.

Take the next step toward site designs that hold up under review and under construction. Open this handbook and start reconciling grading, drainage, accessibility, and stormwater as the single design problem they actually are.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HH4KC8WR
• ISBN13: 9798170336609
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 536 Pages
• Weight: 2.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 8.5" x 11.0"