Department Overview
The field of landscape architecture is continually evolving in response to profound environmental, social, and cultural change. Landscape Architecture at University of Virginia is committed to preparing the next generation of practitioners, scholars, and educators to engage these conditions critically and creatively.
As a department, we advance innovative ideas, insightful perspectives, new techniques, and synthetic design frameworks that operate across contexts and scales. Our approach positions landscape architecture as a vital cultural and ecological practice, foregrounding social and environmental health, technology, and cultural expression as interconnected forces shaping the built and living environment.
Led by internationally recognized and deeply engaged faculty, the program fosters expansive ways of thinking and making. Students encounter diverse ways of understanding socio-ecological systems, innovation and tradition, interspecies relationships, material and artistic expression, and the realities of living in a rapidly changing world.
From the outset of their studies, students are encouraged to shape individualized educational trajectories that build on their prior backgrounds, interests, and skills. The program cultivates students’ passions while equipping them with strong conceptual and technical foundations. Graduates are prepared to work both within and across disciplinary boundaries and alongside human and non-human communities, actively building and advancing more inclusive, resilient, and imaginative futures.
DEGREE PROGRAMS
MLA (Master of Landscape Architecture)
2-year, 2.5 year, or 3-year graduate program
Since Spring 2019, UVA School of Architecture's Master of Landscape Architecture Program (Path 2, Path 2.5, and Path 3) is STEM-designated.
CURRICULAR FOCUS
Our curriculum challenges our students to imagine new landscape systems through rigorous research, design speculation, and the creative deployment of nascent technologies while remaining grounded in the discipline's professional practices and methods of material construction.
Design Studio:
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 design process generated directly from the documentation of place. The second-year studios introduce additional social, political and environmental complexities in the contexts of rural, urban and territorial-scale landscapes while instilling community-engaged and technologically experimental design methods. Studios in the third year offer students opportunities to participate in interdisciplinary studios in cities and locations around the country and abroad. These advanced studios are research based and encourage students to investigate broader issues beyond a specific design problem and arrive at innovative, bold and highly grounded proposals.
Supporting the design studios are three curricular tracks related to technical and theoretical content:
History, Theory + Method:
This track establishes underpinnings of historical and contemporary precedents, lineage of ideas and design lexicons, frameworks for creative practice, and research methods in landscape architecture and in affiliated fields — challenging students to put their scholarly and design work into an evolving body of discipline and profession.
Ecology + Technology ("Ecotech"):
This track integrates the design with science of living materials and environmental phenomena — such as plants, soil, water, climate and topography — as well as local and regional ecological systems through material assembly, site engineering, landscape construction and technologies, with a focus on innovation and testing in multiple contexts and scales.
Media + 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, while incorporating historical and conceptual contexts to the technical exploration and experiment.
Our MLA program emphasizes land-based learning and research that engage landscapes in real time. Students study physical processes, patterns of use, and cultural narratives directly on site, shaping design and research through observation, testing, and care for the land. Through place-based inquiry and hands-on making, students respond to the contingencies of sites, translating material encounters into analytical and speculative work that expands design imagination and deepens ethical, social, and political awareness.
MILTON LANDLAB
The Landscape Architecture Department leads the development of Milton LandLab — a collaboration between faculty and students, with support from the FabLab. Milton LandLab provides a unique opportunity for students to study and propose methodologies and practices for design research based in landscape mediums. Milton LandLab is based at the 172-acre Milton Airfield, located about eight miles east of Campbell Hall, and a formerly operating airport owned by the University of Virginia. As a historically disturbed site (from its use as a WWII airstrip to its present utilization by the Rivanna Radio Control Club's model airplane runway), with frontage along the Rivanna River, forested in parts, meadowed in others, Milton LandLab provides a site for extended study, large-scale intervention, and intimate engagement with landscape media. As a University resource, Milton LandLab is a shared space for learning and experimentation — it offers a unique place for the UVA School of Architecture's students and faculty to engage in innovative research and teaching in landscape design — a place and facility to experiment with landscape forms and processes rigorously on-site and over time.
MORVEN SUSTAINABILITY LAB
Morven, UVA’s place-based sustainability lab directed by Elizabeth Meyer, fosters collaborative learning and exploration grounded in socio-ecological values and leading to innovative policies and practices that tackle urgent climate challenges. Through innovative pan-university exploration and novel community co-creation, Morven’s 2,900-acre site allows students and faculty to transform how we perceive, imagine, discover, and test alternative sustainable futures where humans, other species, and the planet can flourish. Through both individual and collective experiential learning and exploring, Morven’s landscape laboratory incubates the next generation of citizen leaders prepared to address our changing climate. The Department of Landscape Architecture integrates a wide spectrum of courses, research projects, and departmental programming at Morven — from required EcoTech courses and research studios to faculty research plots and student thesis projects — while also supporting its Strategic Action Plan 2025-2035.
Our MLA program is shaped by faculty research that is deeply embedded in real landscapes and communities through unique collaborations and long-term partnerships. Students learn within ongoing research initiatives — working alongside faculty on pressing questions of climate, infrastructure, ecology, equity, and culture — gaining firsthand experience in how design knowledge is produced, tested, and translated into impact.
ADAPTIVE ENVIRONMENTS LAB
The Adaptive Environments Lab is a transdisciplinary research initiative that brings together design, health, environmental science, and computation to develop built environments that can sense, learn, and adapt amid rapid environmental and societal change. Moving beyond predictive design models, the Lab reframes designers as orchestrators working with ecological processes, communities, and computational systems to enable incremental, responsive transformation over time. Through sustained environmental sensing, micro-scale adaptive interventions, and human–computer partnership, the Lab creates prototype workflows that link digital intelligence with physical change, advancing new methods for resilient, health-promoting environments. The Lab is led by Landscape Architecture faculty Bradley Cantrell and School of Medicine faculty Matthew Trowbridge.
ARCTIC DESIGN GROUP
The Arctic Design Group (ADG), founded in 2013 and directed by Landscape Architecture faculty Leena Cho and Architecture faculty Matthew Jull, is a design research initiative focused on landscapes and communities at the frontline of climate extremes. Working across design, science, engineering, and the humanities, the ADG collaborates with tribal organizations, local governments, and federal agencies to address the spatial, material, and cultural consequences of rapid environmental change. Grounded in the synergy between science-based inquiry and community-driven knowledge, the ADG’s action-oriented work spans geospatial analyses and exhibitions, data-intensive fieldwork, and the development of design and planning guidelines. The ADG leads the multiyear, award-winning traveling studio Permafrost Futures, bringing students to Arctic regions undergoing profound transformation and situating interdisciplinary climate research within lived conditions, place-based inquiry, and sustained partnerships.
BUDS (BIOLOGY OF UNDERSTANDING DECIDUOUS SYSTEMS) LAB
The BUDS Lab takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the relationships between phenotype, genotype, and environment in tree species. Led by Environmental Sciences and Landscape Architecture faculty Meghan Blumstein, the Lab aims to better understand the drivers of resilience to stress in tree species and their potential to respond to future change. The Lab’s research uses a combination of experimental, observational, and modeling studies to both drill down to the genes and alleles influencing phenotypes and scale up to examine how patterns of climate, demography and local adaptation may influence future response to change. The Lab utilizes a broad range of tools from genomics and transcriptomics to quantitative genetics, plant physiology, and spatially explicit modeling.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT LAB
Led by Landscape Architecture faculty C.L. Bohannon, the Community Engagement Lab advances collaborative, community-centered design, research, and teaching that address pressing social and environmental challenges. Grounded in equity, reciprocity, and public impact, the Lab brings students, faculty, and community partners together to co-define challenges and co-create resilient landscape solutions. Through design studios and applied research, the Lab integrates participatory methods, performance-based design, and place-based knowledge into the curriculum. Projects focus on food systems, climate adaptation, public space, civic infrastructure, environmental justice, and landscape performance, emphasizing tangible outcomes responsive to community priorities. By supporting sustained partnerships with municipalities, agencies, nonprofits, and community groups, the Lab fosters engaged scholarship and trains students in collaborative, ethical, and impactful landscape practice.
MATERIAL FRONTIERS OF ENERGY
Material Frontiers of Energy explores how minerals, infrastructures, and landscapes underpin the promise — and the contradictions — of the green energy transition. Led by Landscape architecture faculty Matthew Seibert, this research initiative reframes energy systems through through material protagonists and speculative tools that reveal hidden geographies of extraction, conflict, and care. Positioned between design, political ecology, and critical mapping, the work advances landscape architecture as a key discipline for understanding and reshaping the spatial politics of decarbonization.
NATURAL INFRASTRUCTURE LAB
The Natural Infrastructure Lab (NIL), directed by Landscape Architecture faculty Brian Davis and Michael Luegering, works to develop innovative and culturally significant forms of coastal and riverine infrastructure through landscape design research. They partner with governmental, non-profit, and private entities to focus on the potential of plants, sediments, currents, waves, rocks, and the historical and contemporary human practices that engage them to deliver the services society relies on, including coastal resilience, landscape migration, and flood protection. NIL research products work across scales and provide partners with the concepts, forms, and data-driven insights needed to implement innovative natural infrastructure that enhances human and ecological health over time. The Natural Infrastructure Lab supports the EcoTech course sequence in the Department of Landscape Architecture connecting curriculum and research.
SEEDING PEDAGOGIES COLLABORATIVE
The Seeding Pedagogies Collaborative, led by Landscape Architecture faculty Emily Wettstein, is a collaboration between students and educators committed to reimagining landscape-forward design pedagogies, by positioning our pedagogy as both the site and subject of design. This project calls for the disruption of folk pedagogy — teaching the way we were taught — by utilizing the unique skills and sensibilities of landscape designers to critically analyze existing conditions, operationalize seemingly fixed variables, and envision novel futures. This work includes the development of an alternate landscape architecture signature pedagogy from the discipline’s core concepts and methods, the articulation, transformation, and reimagination of design pedagogy’s working model, and the development of collaborative design methods through which to engage both design students and educators in the project of pedagogical design.
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, and China, 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 long-term research developed by faculty, have speculated on design propositions in India, China, Argentina, Japan, Germany, Austria, Mexico, Norway, and more.