Landscape Architecture

Chair: Ann Komara
Email: ann.komara@ucdenver.edu
Office: CU Denver Building 330B
Telephone: 303-315-1000
Fax: 303-315-1050

Associate Chair: Leila Tolderlund
Email: leila.tolderlund@ucdenver.edu
Telephone: 303-315-1028

Faculty

Professors:

Lois A. Brink, MLA, University of Pennsylvania
Ann Komara, MLA, M Arch Hist, University of Virginia

Associate Professor:

Joern Langhorst, Diplom (MLA), University of Hannover

Assistant Professor:

Jody Beck, MArch, PhD, University of Pennsylvania

Assistant Professors (Clinical Teaching Track):

Lori Catalano, MLA, University of Pennsylvania
Leila Tolderlund, MLA, University of Colorado Denver

Senior Instructor:

Anthony R. Mazzeo, MLA, University of Pennsylvania

Instructor:

Emmanuel Didier, MLA, MArch, University of Virginia

Additional information about faculty in this department is on the college’s website.

Overview

The Master of Landscape Architecture program balances theory and practice to prepare students to create health, well-being and environmental resilience through design in the public realm. Our fully accredited professional program takes full advantage of our location in the heart of Denver and the rapidly growing metro area. The program enables students to enter practice and offers distinctive opportunities for students to engage in meaningful projects that impact our communities and our built environment. We educate landscape architects to lead the design and planning process; successful graduates pursue diverse practices and occupations in public and private arenas around the world.

Our students study relevant issues through classes and immersive experiences that challenge them to think critically about the applications and implications for the work we do. While grounded in design and professional skills, the curriculum is structured to fluidly address evolving concerns for our profession, our communities and our environment through topics such as health and well-being, water in the west, food systems, and emerging sustainable practices.

The Degree

We deliver a fully accredited Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) for both first professional degree students and post-professional students (those already holding an accredited undergraduate degree in architecture or landscape architecture). Supplementing this, our students can also obtain concurrent and dual degrees and professional certificates.

The MLA curriculum revolves around a sequence of design studios, supported by core content classes and a variety of seminar courses. The curriculum fosters an ethic of responsibility through an understanding of cultural and community values and natural systems and processes. Students learn skills working on relevant urban and rural projects in a variety of settings, including an immersive studio experience in their final year. Studios and courses engage current issues, define future trends, and explore the role of landscape architecture in a rapidly changing world. Throughout the program, our students learn and apply design and planning skills that use technologies and design approaches to enhance community, foster equity, remediate environmental balance, conserve and regenerate resources, and create places that hold value for current and future generations.

Denver’s vibrant professional design and planning community supports our students through guest teaching, participation in design reviews, exhibitions and lectures, hosting internships and mentor programs, and hosting visits to offices where students meet practitioners and leaders in our field. We have an active student ASLA chapter and our students participate and volunteer in many other campus and community organizations.

Program Objectives

The department has developed five broad program objectives in support of our educational mission. These objectives identify what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate and are linked to a series of measurable student learning outcomes. The five categories are:

Design: Students will be able to formulate questions and arguments about landscape and its role as a significant cultural medium, and determine processes and practices that lead to transformative actions based on ethical, communicative and content knowledge criteria.
Communication and Representation: Students will be able to create and employ appropriate representational media to effectively convey ideas on subject matter contained in the professional curriculum to a variety of audiences, and to articulate and convey ideas orally and in writing.
Professional Ethics: Students will be able to critically evaluate local and global ramifications of social issues, diverse cultures, economic and ecological systems, and professional practice as guiding principles for design thinking and implementation.
Content Knowledge: Students will be able to develop a critical understanding and application of the histories, theories and practices of landscape architecture and its role in reflecting and shaping culture and environments.
Research: Students will be able to develop and apply a diligent, systematic and critical inquiry in support of design and scholarship.

Central Themes

The MLA program prepares students to address current and future problems and challenges in local, regional and global contexts. An issues-based approach ensures that students will be exposed to and participate in the development of new responses to emergent and ongoing crises and opportunities, emphasizing environmental and social justice as a key element for the design of livable, sustainable and resilient places and landscapes. Examples of this are the department’s work in the recovery of the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, working with the local community for five years, and the Learning Landscapes program which successfully redesigned almost 100 schoolyards in Denver. We have addressed issues of water, food scarcity and urban agriculture, the redesign and recovery of post-industrial sites and mining landscapes, issues of health and livability in disadvantaged communities and neighborhoods, the redesign of storm water systems on various scales to respond to catastrophic flooding, and developed scaled strategies and approaches to adapt to wildfires. Many of these projects have involved multiple classes over several years, and have made major impacts on the places and communities they have engaged. Students are immersed in opportunities to not just learn, but to make meaningful change, and interact with community members and professionals from many different backgrounds and disciplines, gaining invaluable experience and skills in working and communicating in interdisciplinary teams.

Big Thinking

We believe that the issues, challenges and opportunities landscape architects face are interrelated, spanning all scales from a small private yard to neighborhood to city to region to the world, and involve a wide range of social, cultural, ecological and economic systems, requiring critical and creative thinking that transcends scales and is cross-, trans- and interdisciplinary.

Critical Issues

We strongly believe that Landscape Architecture is uniquely positioned to make major contributions to the big and urgent questions and issues that affect human and non-human systems. Climate change, resource scarcity, water and food are as critical as the design and building of landscapes and places that are about more than just sustainability and resilience and provide opportunities for people to thrive.

Meaningful Change

While the functioning and performances of human and non-human systems are critical, good design does more than just provide solutions to problems. It provides opportunities for people to interact with places over time, it empowers them to understand the dynamics that affect their environments and to participate in the ongoing processes of changing place and changing communities, thus becoming authors and co-authors of the places they shape and inhabit.