About Landscape Architecture

The mission of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design is to prepare students to be leaders in the discipline of landscape architecture by developing innovative design thinking, design research, and design action. Our faculty and students seek to address the profession’s current and future challenges through the lens of social, environmental, and multispecies climate justice.

The Department of Landscape Architecture was initially established in 1924 and later revitalized in the 1960s under the leadership of Professor Ian McHarg. The Department is recognized internationally for its innovative ecological approach to the design of landscapes, public works, public spaces, and infrastructures. Ecology addresses the rich and entangled web of everyday environmental relationships between living things—humans, plants, and animals—as well as the mineral world. The Department’s faculty and students continue to advance the landscape discipline through design research at multiple scales, from seeds to systems, from urban to rural, and from a multiplicity of positions. A diversity of ecological approaches to our planet’s many natures and cultures is necessary to address the ongoing climate crisis as we work toward both decarbonization and reparative social and environmental justice. Landscape architecture has the capacity to change the earth; we are world-builders equipped with design imagination.

The Department of Landscape Architecture’s professional curriculum supports exploratory independent research and inventive design thinking while encouraging collaborative learning in both the classroom and the field. The curriculum has four distinct interconnected sequences of coursework: Studio, Workshop, Theory, and Media. The sequence aligns both horizontally and vertically across the three years, encouraging students to expand their critical thinking and creative imagination while gaining techniques for visualizing and realizing their ideas in the world. Advanced studios in the final year of study allow students to select from a wide array of options that investigate critical topics around the world. In their final year, students may also pursue their own independently conceived research projects.

The Department’s distinguished landscape faculty provides expertise in design, digital technology, plant science, urban ecology, and history and theory. In their research and teaching, faculty specialize in subjects including global biodiversity, environmental justice, decarbonization and energy policy, nature-based infrastructure, cultural landscapes of memory, critical digital mapping, plant knowledge, environmental sensing, and brownfield regeneration. In addition, leading international practitioners and theorists are regularly invited teach research seminars and lead advanced design studios. Together with strong collaborative links to the other departments in the Weitzman School of Design and allied disciplines across the wider university, the Department is exceptionally well-served by talented and committed educators and practitioners.

The Department’s flagship faculty research center is the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. The McHarg Center is active in the core research areas of climate policy and post-carbon futures; biodiversity and global land use planning; public realm equity and reparative justice; and environmental modeling, sensing, and visualization. Many of the Department’s graduate students are engaged as paid research associates, working directly with faculty through the McHarg Center. The Department is represented in the broader public and academic arenas by a prolific array of significant books by faculty (see Faculty Publications) and the award-winning biannual journal LA+, devoted to advancing interdisciplinary ideas and expanding critical inquiry through the lens of landscape architecture.

The Department offers two primary courses of study leading to a professionally accredited Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA). The first professional degree program is three years in length and is designed for students with an undergraduate degree in a field other than landscape architecture or architecture. The second professional degree is two years in length and is designed for those who already hold an accredited bachelor’s degree in either landscape architecture or architecture. Landscape Architecture is designated as a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) discipline by the US Department of Homeland Security. Following graduation from the MLA program, international students holding F-1 visas may be eligible for a 24-month Optional Practical Training (OPT) extension beyond their initial OPT of 12 months for a total of 36 months.  Dual degree programs with architecture (MLA/MARCH), city planning (MLA/MCP), historic preservation (MLA/MSHP), urban spatial analytics (MLA/MUSA), fine arts (MLA/MFA), and environmental science (MLA/MES) are also available. The Master of Landscape Architecture degree may be combined with any of the Weitzman certificate programs, such as the Urban Design Certificate. The Department also offers a Certificate in Landscape Studies, designed for students in other departments at the school or wider university who may wish to augment or focus their work with research into landscape topics.