The field of Landscape Architecture is rapidly evolving to address and redress contemporary environmental and societal issues. The next generation of practitioners, scholars, and educators is facing important problems and challenges. Landscape Architecture strives to educate and inspire the next generation of landscape architecture leaders. Architects develop innovative ideas, critical perspectives, synthetic frameworks, and new methods to address landscape issues through design across a wide range of contexts and scales, from garden to region. This approach to design emphasizes issues of ecology, social and environmental health, technology, and cultural expression.

What is Landscape Architecture?

Landscape architecture is a profession that combines art and science to design attractive, functional, and sustainable outdoor spaces. Landscape architects work collaboratively with other professionals to plan, design, and manage public spaces such as urban plazas, parks, conservation areas, and golf courses. Landscape architects are also involved in tourism planning and sustainable community design. They balance human use and enjoyment with environmental health to conserve our outdoor spaces for generations to come.

Landscape Architecture programs prepare students for careers as landscape architects who will imagine, design, and build the 21st century’s landscapes. Landscape architecture offers the tools to engage many of the most pressing issues the world faces today. Students explore contemporary issues, directly engage landscapes and communities outside the walls of the university, and learn with a faculty of leading landscape practitioners and researchers.

Why Landscape Architecture?

Landscape Architecture programs address placemaking, integrating art and design with the latest knowledge in the environmental sciences — producing leaders and future leaders that will play key roles at the forefront of the field. You will be prepared to  learn how to successfully work in the field of landscape architecture by learning how to:

• Employ ecological principles authentically in a wide range of environments — from the center of redeveloping cities to changing rural landscapes

• Synthesize information about ecological processes and systems, human behavior, cultural/political institutions, and urban patterns

• Utilize design precedent and research as a tool that actively informs the design process and ideation

• Visualize your proposals utilizing technologies ranging from sketching and model-making to virtual reality simulations, all of which inform design decision-making

• Create sustainable landscapes that are deep, inspiring, and just, and that work aesthetically, ecologically, socially, technically, and economically

Landscape Architecture Degrees

Academic programs focus on the development of flexible design processes for landscape and urban design, an understanding of ecological systems, sustainable practices and use of materials, site planning, and advanced drafting and rendering techniques. By graduation, you will have a portfolio that reflects your unique creative vision within this rapidly expanding and evolving profession.

The purpose of programs in Landscape Architecture will be the acquisition of multidisciplinary academic training aimed at the training of professionals specific to landscaping, which to date is non-existent, covering the analysis and design of the landscape, as well as the development of specific projects of urban, cultural and spatial planning landscapes.

The undergraduate landscape architecture curriculum is a broad-based course of study that provides instruction in the skills necessary for professional practice and is a license-qualifying, first professional degree. In addition to the required landscape architecture courses, students are expected to fulfill university requirements in biological, physical, and social sciences, humanities, and written and oral communication.

The degree programs are designed to accommodate a variety of academic backgrounds, both with and without design training in landscape architecture and architecture. Therefore, each student’s curriculum plan is tailored to the individual’s specific background and academic goals.