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The Profession of landscape architecture
The University of Georgia
The School of Environmental Design
The Master of Landscape Architecture Program
The Students
Preparation for the study of landscape architecture

The profession of landscape architecture

Although the profession of landscape architecture is small in terms of numbers of people, it is broad and versatile in application. Its science is founded in cultural and ecological analysis. Its art is to create places that are meaningful. Its ethic is the care of land and the people who live with it.

Landscape architects design communities and environments that aim to be ecologically sound, functionally efficient, and preserving of community values. They solve problems of development, protection and restoration. The land use contexts in which they work range from wilderness to city; the scale ranges from a multi-state region to a garden or courtyard.

Job demand and average salaries for landscape architectural graduates have been increasing in recent years. But it is still not a field to get into if you want to be a millionaire. The reasons to get into landscape architecture are that you love the work and you think you can do some good with it — if so, then it will be the best thing that ever happened to you.

MLA graduates are important to the profession and society. Most of the country's leading practitioners, most recent ASLA presidents, and essentially all of the country's landscape architectural educators hold MLA degrees.

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The University of Georgia is the oldest state-chartered university in the United States. The 30,000-student campus houses world-class libraries and laboratories. Its considerable strengths in ecology, geography and natural resource management provide strong interdisciplinary reinforcement to the study of landscape architecture.

The campus is located in Athens, an hour's drive from Atlanta. As a center of music, culture and education, Athens has been called the "most enlightened city in Georgia". It is the center of a region where mountain, coastal, and intensely urban landscapes are all within reach. This is the fastest-developing region of the country; in this region the skills and insights of landscape architects are in demand to solve urgent problems of land use, environmental protection, and quality of life.

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On this large university campus, the School of Environmental Design and the MLA program are small units where people who share their commitment to disciplinary focus and ethic, work hard together on a personal and daily basis.

The school is based in Denmark Hall, Caldwell Hall, and the Founder's House in the University's historic "North campus". The school's computer labs in both Caldwell and Denmark Hall are updated continuously to support classes and projects. The garden surrounding the school was constructed as a memorial to those who founded the nation's first garden club here in 1891.

Today Georgia is the largest school of landscape architecture in the United States, with the largest and most complete landscape architectural faculty anywhere. It is the only school with faculty representing a full and balanced spectrum of landscape architectural specializations and viewpoints. Within that spectrum, the school has traditional particular strengths in the environmental and historic preservation aspects of landscape architecture. Small MLA classes take advantage of the school's considerable resources with personalized instruction and guidance. Each year about 15 excellent new students are selectively admitted to the program.

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Georgia's MLA program aims to assure a basic professional grounding in landscape architecture, to allow individual students to develop special focus areas within the profession, and to stimulate and train them to make lasting contributions to the profession and to society.

Georgia's MLA program is one of the oldest graduate landscape architectural programs in the country, having been initiated in 1954. Among Georgia's MLA alumni are winners of national design competitions, Presidents and Fellows of the American Society of Landscape Architects, heads of prestigious university departments, senior editors of national journals, leaders of the National Park Service and other public institutions, most of the designers of the 1996 Olympic venues, and leading practitioners all over the world.

Georgia provides landscape architectural education that is distinctively broad and adaptable to the interests of individual students. Georgia employs its considerable resources and student-defined research to develop the unique professional roles of individual students, and to produce graduates who can use powers of scholarship, design and communication to discover and advocate superior solutions to landscape problems.

Georgia's MLA program is staffed by the largest full-time landscape architectural faculty in the country. All specializations within landscape architecture are represented here. Dialogs among competing viewpoints are frequent occurrences. In this large, diverse, active school, small graduate classes are supportive intellectually and socially. This is a good program for students who have the self-motivation and self-direction to explore alternative viewpoints, to define for themselves what their roles in the profession will be, and to seek out the specific resources that contribute most directly to those roles.

Different students are tracked through 3-, 2- or 1-year programs depending on their educational and professional backgrounds. Students in the three-year track develop upon a solid liberal arts background with their first professional degree. A structured series of initial courses disciplines these students to acquire professional fundamentals in a systematic way. These students also experience the breadth of specialties and viewpoints within the profession and related fields, through their exposure to the school's numerous faculty, the school's numerous professional speakers, and active interdisciplinary connections. Seminar courses introduce theory as a tool to penetrate practical problems, and to question conventional design assumptions and rules of thumb. Students with prior degrees in landscape architecture or architecture enter Georgia's 2-year and 1-year tracks, seeking further professional development and intellectual content in their work. All advanced students define their individual roles in the profession by taking elective courses and identifying specific faculty for focused study. In the final year of study, when all students are working on specialized courses and individual research, students who discovered landscape architecture only a few years before work side-by-side with licensed practitioners with 10 years or more of professional experience.

Careful faculty advisement is essential to effective individual discovery and planning of a course of study. The MLA Coordinator meets with each student every semester to review the prospective course of study. Selected professors suggest further refinements in the course of study and give direction toward elective courses, additional readings, and conception of thesis. In turn, the program demands of each student self-definition and self-motivation, for choosing a coherent combination of electives, orderly initiation and timely completion of thesis, and preparation for specific types of roles in practice.

In the concluding written thesis, students learn to utilize the latest published literature and rigorous design and evaluation to develop new and valid solutions to landscape problems. The approaches of some theses are artistic; some are scientific; some are historical; and some are theoretical. All respond to contemporary needs. This exercise trains students to address open-ended questions of the types posed to advanced practitioners, and to make real contributions to the field.

Recent design projects have included river greenways in two states, the reconstruction of a Longwood Gardens conservatory, the realignment of part of the Appalachian Trail, national wildlife parks in Kenya, water-conserving golf courses, the rehabilitation of inner-city neighbor-hoods, erosion control on the 1,100 mile shoreline of a Corps of Engineers lake, new communities throughout the Southeast, and the conservation of endangered plant communities in Japan.

Essentially all students obtain professional experience during their last summer. In recent years internships have been located in the southwestern regional office of the National Park Service in Santa Fe, New Mexico; an architectural office in Kerala, India; Point Reyes National Seashore, California; consulting design offices in Beverly Hills, Boston, Portland, and St. Louis; botanical gardens in Delaware and New York; and alpine restorations on the slopes of Mount Rainier.

Programs and events in all parts of the university campus support growth in landscape architecture. Each spring the school hosts an Alumni Weekend, which brings alumni from all parts of the country to speak on the latest work in the profession. Endowed lecture series bring distinguished practitioners of landscape architecture and historic preservation for major lectures and extended meetings with students. The Red Clay Conference is an annual environmental law conference, held each spring in the law school's facilities adjacent to the School of Environmental Design. Seminars and lectures in environmental ethics, ecology, and the humanities are held year-round. Georgia has been home to the first American conference on landscape ecology, two annual conferences of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, and the first two international conferences on environmental ethics.

The program is accredited by the American Society of Landscape Architects.

MLA Course Descriptions

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Georgia's MLA students come from all types of backgrounds, bringing unique viewpoints and powerful skills. They come from all over the country and all over the world. Georgia has traditionally been particularly attractive to those who want to emphasize the environmental or historic preservation aspects of landscape architecture, those who wish to take advantage of the professional self-direction implicit in Georgia's program, and those who simply wish to participate in a school with a solid, long-standing professional reputation.

All Georgia students are academically excellent as a result of selection for admission from a large pool of applicants. Georgia's MLA students have received Honor Awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects for their work in design, research and communication; published the results of their theses in national professional journals; and been cited biographically in Who's Who Among American College and University Students.

Essentially all students enter in the fall semester and stay together as a class through the sequence of courses. The numbers of men and women are about equal. Students and professors are all on a first-name basis. Team design projects are common. Through their shared commitment and experience, classmates tend to get to know each other very well, and to support and stimulate each other's learning.

Most of the students are in the three-year track, coming to landscape architecture from liberal arts backgrounds. Their college majors were in every field from religion to business to biology. Some three-year students come to the MLA with one or two years' experience in pre-professional internships in landscape architectural offices. Some come with prior graduate degrees in fields such as ecology or planning. With their diverse backgrounds and independent viewpoints, they converge upon their common interest in landscape architecture. The students' diversity stimulates the learning experience of the program, but emphasizes the importance of the early, basic professional courses for students entering landscape architecture for the first time.

Students with prior professional design degrees enter Georgia's 2-year and 1-year tracks, where they join the 3-year students in their second and third years of study. These students are seeking further professional development and intellectual content in their work. Georgia's MLA students not only learn basic facts and skills; they prepare to make lasting contributions to the profession, the environment and society.

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Georgia seeks students who are academically capable, who know what to expect from graduate study in landscape architecture, who are prepared to be committed and productive when they get here, and who have the self-discipline to focus on, analyze and evaluate advanced landscape architectural problems.

All students can prepare best for advanced training in landscape architecture by obtaining balanced liberal educations encompassing both the arts and the sciences and ensuring ability in oral and written communication.

Students without prior design backgrounds should test their commitment to landscape architecture and obtain preliminary training by taking courses at colleges, technical schools, botanical gardens, architectural centers or nature centers in fine art, design, plant identification, horticulture, environmental issues, or CAD. They should visit the offices of local practitioners, to see the kinds of work being done and the kinds of people who are doing it — ask them what kind of background they had for their work, and what they would advise for you. They should take a preliminary drawing course at a community college or a local continuing education center — the purpose is to introduce them to the "courage to put pencil to paper" that is needed to perform creative design tasks and to continue studying design graphics productively at the graduate level.

All students should request information from a number of MLA programs around the country. The various programs present landscape architecture to their students in different ways and with distinctive emphases. Georgia is concerned that every student end up at the right program to meet individual needs and expectations.

All students should read at least some of the following publications, or ones like them, before entering Georgia's MLA program. They are preliminary to landscape architecture: they deal more with values and perceptions than with techniques. Some of them may be out of print and available only in libraries, not bookstores; that does not reduce their value to you as background to landscape architecture.

Landscape, environment, and quality of life:

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

Robert D. Bullard, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color

Tony Hiss, Experience of Place

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature

William Murtaugh, Keeping Time

Michael Pollan, Second Nature

James Rose, Gardens Make Me Laugh

Ann Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden, Urban Nature and Human Design

William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

Examples of region-specific environments and issues:

[Add publications about your own region to these examples]

Henry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades, River of Grass

Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, the American West and Its Disappearing Water

Journals:

American Forests

Historic Preservation

Landscape Architecture

Landscape Journal

Restoration and Management Notes

Urban Land

 

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