Department Overview

The graduate program in Landscape Architecture at UVA challenges students to imagine new landscape systems through rigorous research, design speculation, and the deployment of nascent technologies. We are committed to preparing our graduates to be critical thinkers and global citizens to form a more inclusive and resilient world while shaping the next generation of landscape practice.

 

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 are facing important problems and challenges. Landscape Architecture at UVA strives to educate and inspire the next generation of landscape architecture leaders. As a department we develop innovative ideas, critical perspectives, synthetic frameworks, and new techniques to address landscape problems through design across a broad range of contexts and scales, from the garden to the region. In this design approach we emphasize issues of ecology, social and environmental health, technology, and cultural expression. As internationally recognized academics and practitioners, the Landscape Architecture Faculty at UVA present varied perspectives, skills and expertise. Collectively, we promote a broad perspective on socio-ecological contexts, innovation and tradition, inter-species articulation, cultural and artistic expression, ecological health, and the challenges of living in a rapidly changing environment.

From the time students enter their studies, they are encouraged to shape their own individual educational trajectories by integrating their design or non-design undergraduate backgrounds, intellectual interests, and skills into their studies in landscape architecture. We aim to cultivate the passions and individual insights of students while preparing them with the conceptual and technical tools to work across disciplinary boundaries, with human and non-human communities, to help make a more inclusive and resilient world.

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Landscape Arch Landing 1

DEGREE PROGRAMS

MLA (Master of Landscape Architecture)

2-year, 2.5 year, or 3-year graduate program

As of Spring 2019, UVA School of Architecture's Master of Landscape Architecture Program (Path 2, Path 2.5, and Path 3) is STEM-designated.


WHY UVA LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE?

UVA Landscape Architecture Chair Brad Cantrell and Graduate Program Director Leena Cho share highlights of the program.

Student Perspectives

Learn about the MLA program from our students.


CURRICULAR FOCUS

Our curriculum challenges our students to imagine new landscape systems through rigorous research, design speculation, and the deployment of nascent technologies while remaining grounded in the discipline's professional practices and methods of material construction. 

Our curriculum is built around the design studio (6 credit hours), taken each semester. The studio sequence exposes students to the range of scales and topical issues in landscape architecture. In emphasizing the ability to read and interpret a site within its context and shape its future based on those findings, the initial studios are based locally and emphasize on-site experience and documentation of place. Studios in the second and third years offer students opportunities to participate in interdisciplinary studios in cities and locations around the country and abroad. These advanced studios are research based, which encourages students to investigate the broader issues beyond a specific design problem and arrive at innovative and bold proposals.

Supporting the design studios are three curricular tracks related to technical and theoretical content: 

Histories + Theories: 

This track establishes underpinnings of ancient and contemporary precedents, histories of ideas in landscape architecture and in affiliated fields, challenging students to put their scholarly and creative work into an evolving body of critical thinking and practice. 

EcoTech (Ecology + Technology):

This track integrates the design and science of plants, soil, water, climate and landform as well as local and regional ecological systems through material assembly, site engineering, landscape construction and technologies; focuses on innovation through living and computational systems in both native and urban contexts in multiple scales.  

Design Computation: 

This track investigates a broad range of digital and computational design tools—including drawing, modeling, simulation, monitoring, and advanced fabrication—and their creative synthesis in use to develop design, design processes and workflows; incorporates historical and conceptual contexts to the technical exploration and experiment.

We promote and create global research and travel opportunities for our students, with the recognition that the future of landscape architecture is increasingly global. Direct engagement with the sites and communities we are studying and designing for is a critical part of our curricula. Our students travel locally and nationally, but also internationally to experience design in-situ, to engage in fieldwork, and to gain a deeper awareness of global cultures. 

Students have many options to study abroad for summer sessions or for full semesters. UVA School of Architecture offers ongoing programs in Venice, Vicenza, Barcelona, China, and Ghana, and continues to build its study abroad opportunities. 

In addition, our research studios focus on global sites, cultures and questions; Recent studios, as well as ongoing research developed by faculty, have speculated on design propositions in India, China, Argentina, Japan, Germany, the Arctic, and more.

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