Master of Landscape Architecture
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Note: While applications to the Program in Landscape Architecture are reviewed on a rolling basis, we encourage applicants to submit their materials by January 15.
More than ever, the world needs landscape architects—more informed, more innovative, more critically involved landscape architects. Globally, the complex urbanization of populations and strain on the environment and natural resources continues to escalate. Locally, the organization, reclamation, and understanding of our cities require the vitality, imagination, managerial sophistication, and compelling design vision of the landscape architect. Among the design professions, landscape architects are assuming leadership roles in transforming conditions of crisis to promise, neglect to value, banality to poetry. The Program of Landscape Architecture at IIT is driven by these needs and aspirations.
Chicago is the active synthesis of the urban and the natural. Geographically it is positioned in dramatic poise within the Great Lakes Basin, where twenty percent of the world's fresh water supply is not only a natural resource but an economic catalyst in the development of the city. Chicago is the birthplace of the only genuine American landscape aesthetic—the Prairie School Landscape. The city also enjoys the foresight of a world-class park system sponsored by the 1893 Columbian Exposition, as well as the world-renowned Chicago Botanic Garden. Furthermore, the city itself has publicly embraced an action-oriented campaign in current landscape revitalization and environmental goals—Millennium Park, Chicago Green Roof and Sustainability Initiatives, to name but a few. Locally, the IIT campus offers an invigorating combination of pioneering early modern landmarks to study in and learn from.
Grounded in the tradition of design excellence, technical expertise, and acute visual judgment established by Mies van ver Rohe within IIT's College of Architecture, the landscape architecture program is also inspired by the legacy of Alfred Caldwell, the long-term instructor of landscape design at IIT and a frequent collaborator of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. Like his mentor, the great prairie landscape architect Jens Jensen, Caldwell's search for the "spirit of the native landscape" was driven by an attention to craft, a hands-on bootstrap energy, and a deep understanding of the plants, construction materials, and environmental needs of the Midwestern landscape. The program's philosophy strives to embrace these timeless ethics while critically incorporating contemporary scientific, ecological, cultural, technical, and artistic influences.
The need to provide constructive, conscientious, and aesthetically compelling environments has never been more pressing. IIT students learn in an unsurpassed setting, utilizing enviable natural and urban resources with world renowned faculty and colleagues similarly inspired and oriented around these responsibilities and challenges. We invite you to join us in being an instrumental part of this program.
To be admitted without conditions to the Master of Landscape Architecture program, an applicant is required to have prior coursework in the following: freehand drawing, biology, geology. Candidates will be notified upon admission as to their exact program of study, which depends upon their prior preparation.
Peter L. Osler