ABSTRACT
Understanding how to grade landscape and built elements separately is the first step to mastering grading. This chapter focuses on common examples that might occur on the exam, but note that there are endless possibilities that occur in the professional world. Warped planes are more common in the landscape than planes with a consistent uniform slope or slopes. They occur in both landscape situations, such as baseball and football fields, or in hardscape situations, such as open plazas. Unlike fields, plazas and parking lots have impermeable or semipermeable surfaces with minimal percolation. Culverts are engineering devices, usually a pipe, that shuttles water under roads and other structures, and, in some cases, they have associated wing walls at the entrance and exit of the pipe. They are part of the open drainage system because water daylights on the other side of the structure.
