The curriculum has four distinct interconnected sequences that are required of all students (except those who may be allowed to waive certain requirements because of previous experience or training). These are the Design Studio, Workshop, Theory, and Media sequences. The curriculum is designed so that these four sequences relate to one another horizontally throughout the entire degree.
A three-year student is expected to take six semesters of design studio work, the first four of which are considered core requirements (501, 502, 601 and 602) and the last two are elective choices. All studios meet for 12 hours per week, and the core studios are supplemented by the media courses, which meet for 3-4 hours per week.
For students in the three-year MLA program, the LARP Studio II and III, Media II and III, Workshop II, III and IV all have pre-requisites. Students must have successfully completed Studio I, Media I and Workshop I, prior to moving through the additional courses in those sequences. Each core course is a pre-requisite of the one that numerically follows it. The Department of Landscape Architecture will drop a student from a core Studio, Media or Workshop course if the student has not successfully completed the course in the previous semester or resolved an "Incomplete" grade prior to the start of the subsequent semester, unless special circumstances prevail.
Students in the two-year MLA program must successfully complete or resolve "Incomplete" grades in Studio III and Workshop III prior to taking Studio IV and Workshop IV. The Department will drop a student from a course if they have not met the pre-requisite prior to the start of the subsequent semester, unless special circumstances prevail.
Design Sequence
At Penn, design is the primary focus of our teaching and research. By "design", we mean four things: material practice (the physical making of things, places, environments; the experiential aspects of things made, including drawings and models); synthetic practice (the inter-relating of things, ideas, places in newly synthetic ways; the development of an inclusive creativity); inquiring practice (the asking of questions, exploring of ideas, and speculating upon alternative sets of possibility); and process-based practice (the recognition that landscapes are formed and evolved by processes in time, and that creativity too is dependent upon the processes one works through to develop a project).
These studies of design occur in the studio, where hypothetical scenarios surrounding the development of real sites and programs are used to make projects. Such projects vary from the design of pathways and platforms in forests and quarries (first year) to gardens and parks, plazas and waterfronts, brownfield and derelict land reclamations, housing and mixed-use urban developments, and regional plans.
By way of sequencing exercises and studios, we work with five general steps: first is the development of visual and manual acuities-learning how to see and record, primarily through training in observation, drawing, and making things. Second is learning how to imagine and work with a variety of scalar and spatial configurations as well as temporal effects. Third is the development of approaches and techniques to respond to and enhance the specific qualities of particular sites . Fourth is the development of imaginative and speculative skills so as to envision plausible alternative futures that are critically informed by past and current ideas. And fifth learning how to intervene in and reorganize ecological and cultural systems in newly creative ways across a range of scales.