Master of Landscape Architecture

The Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture (SoA) is pleased to announce an open call for applications from students of the future.

Pratt MLA is the newest and most forward-looking academic program in landscape architecture. Our mission is to advance land-based research at the cutting edge of climate and public change. We welcome students with a desire to contribute to design at the intersection of living and built environments. Students committed to change, because as the climate emergency continues to unfold, we believe landscape education must also be willing to transform and adapt to meet the complex demands of our beautiful but often imperiled world.

Pratt Institute is situated on Lenapehoking, the traditional and unceded homeland of the Lenape people, past, present, and future. The Lenape people have been living on this land long before the United States was established, and their wisdom is essential to our time. We acknowledge that the genocide, theft of land and resources, forced migration, and systematic cultural oppression of Indigenous Peoples and Nations have a long-lasting impact on the living conditions, mental health, and cultural lineage of Indigenous Peoples and Nations. We acknowledge that the colonizers and their descendants have benefited economically and socially from the oppression of Indigenous Peoples and Nations, and we commit to repairing inequity and rebalancing the power distribution.

Pratt MLA approaches landscape architecture as a design field with a deep commitment to creating more equitable and amendatory relationships among people and place. In an era of instability, we are focused on cultivating relations with the land that sustains all species, including our own. To this end, our mission is to foster site-sensitive, land-based practices that advance the global movement for climate, environmental, and social justice.

Pratt MLA is pleased to invite applicants who wish to work in radical collaboration, as we grow to meet the challenges of the present. Our faculty are landscape practitioners, botanists, theorists, artists and planners: Mariel Collard Arias, Cathryn Dwyre, Rosetta S. Elkin, Jeffrey Hogrefe, Sanford Kwinter, Elliott Maltby, Signe Nielsen, Benjamin Goulet-Scott, and Jacob Suissa.

Pratt MLA is a three-year MLA first professional degree that offers a core curriculum based on an innovative studio sequence that advances through an inverted approach to scale: studios launch from Region to Shore in the first year, and from Borough to Park in the second studio sequence. In the third year, students focus their studio practice on in-depth, land-based research projects that are developed in partnership with regional communities and local practitioners. The third year of study is structured as a supportive framework for establishing and articulating novel practices.

Pratt MLA prioritizes collective inquiry and collaborative learning while examining how humankind impacts and remediates, extracts and externalizes, cultivates and creates change.  Graduates will be practiced in describing and analyzing landscape transformations from Boreal forests to Superfund sites; capable of thinking and designing with and among large scale systems, historied ecology, evolutionary processes, and individual organisms; and, ready—with boots on—to move lithely between the field and the design studio.  

Consider applying. Or reach out because you are curious, studylandscape [​at​] pratt.edu. Contact us to receive a zoom link for the virtual open house on December 12.