Landscape Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture (M.L.A.)
Programs and Objectives
Master of Landscape Architecture Program (Program Director - Professor Catherine Seavitt Nordenson)
Landscape architecture plays an essential role in connecting justice to environmental design and the ecological infrastructures of the urban realm. The mission of the Master of Landscape Architecture Program is to prepare students to be leaders in the field of landscape architecture through innovative research and practice in urban ecological design, planning, and policymaking. The program aims to reimagine and rethink the profession’s current and future challenges through the lens of social, environmental, and multi-species justice, including rapid urbanization, resource extraction and management, the interface of nature and technology, ongoing species extinctions, and the climate emergency. The curriculum engages critical thinking about complex and indeterminate systems, empowering students to implement actionable change across multiple scales of the urban landscape.
Landscape architecture is a discipline that physically transforms the surface of the earth — it literally changes the world and the world’s systemic flows. As designers and thinkers, we work with biotic and abiotic networks of human and non-human actors. Our discipline also has the capacity to radically rethink and transform social networks, and we are especially well-poised to respond to the climate emergency with both mitigation and adaptation strategies. Our program attracts activist students who seek to rethink accepted paradigms and implement actionable change in the public realm and the quality of public space in terms of equity, accessibility, and justice: climate justice, social justice, environmental justice, and multispecies justice. Transforming the profession begins in the academy. Our landscape architecture program is committed to challenging the entrenched biases and historical canons of landscape architecture that have too long been accepted as the norm, and we support the clarity and resonance of our students’ diverse voices in the field.
The graduate programs at the Spitzer School of Architecture share a transdisciplinary design-research environment of year-long vertical studios, a modified adaptation of the “unit system” developed by Alvin Boyarsky in London in the early 1970s. First-year MLA students enroll in a foundation year of coursework addressing design thinking across nature and culture while building digital, technical, ecological, and critical-thinking skills. Second-year and third-year MLA students enroll in advanced year-long landscape architecture design studios that are paired with a co-required course each semester. They also take two additional courses each semester that engage with technical, ecological, and professional practice topics. The advanced vertical studios merge the design studios with co-required and coordinated coursework addressing design research, advanced digital representation, and history/theory. The vertical studios address “wicked problems” in landscape architecture through extended design thinking, and produce an integrated environment in which students and professors work synthetically across disciplines for a two-semester engagement with exploratory research and projective design
Requirements for the M.L.A. Degree
Master of Landscape Architecture First Professional Degree
Semester 1
Semester 2
Semester 3
Semester 4
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| LAAR 64100 | Landscape Architecture Studio IV | 6 | |
| LAAR 64400 | Planting Design | 3 | |
| | Elective (Urbanism) | 3 | |
| | Elective (History) | 3 | |
Semester 5
Semester 6
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| LAAR 66100 | Landscape Architecture Studio VI | 6 | |
| | Elective (Professional) | 3 | |
| | Elective (History) | 3 | |
| | Elective General | 3 | |
| Total Credit Hours: | 90 | |