Workshop

After Mike Lin graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1972, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at West Virginia University for 3 years before he joined the faculty of Kansas State University’s Landscape Architecture Department in 1975, where he taught a class called "Landscape Architectural Delineation".

He also began a condensed, twelve-day “intersession” class, equivalent to a semester’s worth of work for students not able to register for fall or spring terms. This intensive "intersession" later provided the format of Mike’s popular twelve-day workshops in Manhattan, Kansas.

In 1979, landscape architecture students' national convention "LABash" was held at Kansas State University. Mike Lin presented an extraordinary graphics session which caught the attention of past national ASLA president Jot Carpenter and national executive vice president Edward Able. They both decided to invite Mike to present one-day hands-on sessions for members from coast to coast, and also to give short educational sessions during the next several national ASLA meetings. This opportunity brought Mike Lin into the exposure within the design community and academia nationwide.

People began to gain interest in developing their graphic skills as a result of their participation in the one-day sessions coast to coast and sessions from the ASLA national conventions. They all joined the Kansas State students in the above mentioned intersessions. As more people became involved in these twelve-day classes, the number of referrals likewise rose. Continually higher numbers of people were attending the intersessions, and by 1987 - when Mike decided to resign as a tenured full professor at Kansas State - he was ready to venture into his own format of unique teaching. An investment was made in Manhattan Kansas to obtain a commercial building with full facilities, where audio/video equipment was set up to accommodate a growing number of participants. In 2004, Mike has decided to partially move the residence and his workshop to Burlingame California (20 miles south of San Francisco) so he can enjoy a better weather and be closer to his two children and grand kids. Meanwhile, one week workshops in San Francisco are then created and established to cater the growing numbers of designers on the west coast.

At the present time, the workshop has served over one hundred fifty thousand people seeking to improve their graphic skills and proper attitude in drawing. Their testimonials regarding the influence of the workshop can be reviewed in personal accounts of the workshop experience.