Landscape Architecture
Landscape architects provide sustainable solutions, support active lifestyle, design transportation solutions, assist in historic preservation and manage water resources. We help families, communities and businesses address important local, regional and national priorities.
Landscape Architecture
Degree Opportunities
Program Description
The Landscape Architecture Program is fully accredited by the Landscape Architecture Accreditation Board and is the only four-year accredited program in a four-state region. This program also offers the only collaborative interdisciplinary approach with the allied disciplines of architecture, interior design and planning.
Landscape architecture combines art and environmental sciences. Landscape architects design exterior spaces and places. Those less familiar with landscape architecture tend to think of the profession in relatively basic terms, involving plantings around a building or in a park, for example. The reality is quite different; the profession is much broader, richer, and far-reaching. Landscape architects design at many scales, ranging from a tiny roof deck terrace to thousands of acres of National Forest lands; from the private realm of corporate office courtyard to the public realm of a neighborhood park or community plan; from the specialized creation of a healing garden at a hospital to a customized rehabilitation of a native wetlands. The numerous project types, practice types, along with the professional possibilities available to someone with a background in landscape architecture is almost unlimited.
The four-year undergraduate program consists of a common first year of courses shared by students in architecture, interior design, and landscape architecture. This year is followed by two years where students develop discipline-based knowledge and skills focused on site and building, community planning and design, and urban environments. The final year allows for collaborative work with students in architecture, interior design, and planning in research-based studios. Students participate in exploring a broad range of design problems in the studios where they develop design solutions that are presented to practicing professionals and for some projects, actual clients or partners. Students participate in a myriad of opportunities to support learning in the profession including professional electives, seminars, minors, lecture series, and study abroad. Learning about the profession continues in the required internship program where students work in professional design firms for academic credit. The Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree requires 120-semester credit hours of coursework.
Accreditation: LAAB
The Bachelor of Landscape Architecture program is committed to the transformative power of design. The faculty and students come together in a creative environment combining studio-based teaching and learning, innovative research and creative activity, and community focused service and engagement to enable faculty and graduates to address the synthesis of environmental systems and human need with innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary action.
Mission Statement
College
We create a resilient, healthy, and beautiful world, within a diverse and inclusive culture of rigorous inquiry and innovation, united by the transformative power of planning and design.
Program
In the pursuit of creating resilient, sustainable, and joyful places, we seek to advance and challenge the field of Landscape Architecture through collaborative, multidisciplinary teaching, research and design activity, considering ecology, heritage, diversity and equity as essential considerations in the creation of sustainable landscapes
Culture
College
Our intellectual environment thrives because of our: diverse perspectives, dynamic close-knit community, and pursuit of meaningful impact
Program
Our multidisciplinary faculty are committed to the role of Landscape Architecture as a vital participant in advancing solutions to the pressing issues of our time open discussion, expectation of excellence, and mutual support for each other.
Values
College
Demand excellence, be courageous, practice empathy, look beyond, inspire impact.
Program
Value the interrelated relationship between cultural and natural systems in the built environment, Believe the future is made in the present, embrace leadership through empathy, and build connections between both local and global perspectives.
Featured Work
Phyto
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Phyto provides a minimally invasive long-term solution to the city of Omaha, Nebraska’s lead pollution problem. Omaha is home to the largest residential EPA Superfund site in the country, due to the pollution created by multiple lead smelting and manufacturing plants that left behind over 100 years worth of lead contamination across Omaha, which disproportionately and severely affect the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations today.
Phytoremediation, from which the name Phyto is obtained, refers to the use of plants to remove pollutants in soil or groundwater. This site would be the headquarters for a network of phytoremediative test plots. It is an opportunity for research on these processes to be done on a large scale, while simultaneously remedying the destructive effects on Omaha lead continues to cause. The expanse of contaminated land in Omaha would enable this to extend outwards as needed, and has the potential to develop in other regions.
The architecture on our site is research focused with an emphasis on public interface, including lab spaces and research areas, a gallery space to display discoveries, along with an auditorium space to present work to the local residents. The landscape functions as both research into different methods of phytoremediation and an educational tool for the public.
Redlining confined vulnerable populations to our site due to its proximity to the lead smelting plants. The disrepair and neglect carried out by the City of Omaha has had lasting and severe effects which can still be seen today in the many unremediated plots of land and the affected health and wellbeing of residents.
STUDIO DESCRIPTION:
POST- STUDIO is a multidisciplinary collaborative studio between architecture and landscape architecture students exploring the relationship between land, justice, climate change, and policy. Post-Carbon, Post-Oil, Post-Spatial Disparity, Post-Anthropocene, Post- <insertproblematique>. The notion of "Post-" implies a future state. In this studio, students are asked to speculate on the future of ongoing current issues that are impacting our communities. One of the most significant national conversations surrounding these concerns is the Green New Deal (GND), which considers the state as an activist force to consider issues of global warming, economic inequalities, and systemic racism/sexism.
The GND is a reference to the New Deal (1933-1939), which was a “series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States responding to needs for relief, reform, and recovery from the Great Depression.” POST- Studio is a participant in the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) sponsored Green New Deal Superstudio, where academic design studios across the country explored critical themes outlined by the recent Green New Deal climate proposal.
Within this framework, the studio asks, what does it mean to be a design activist? And what is the relationship of architecture and land, and how do we, as stewards of the environment, critically respond to ongoing and contentious political discourse? Geographically, this studio focuses on historically redlined areas of Omaha. Through research and designing, students sought to explore the implications of a variety of salient issues considered as part of the Green New Deal, including lead contamination, food access, job training, and community resilience.
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