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Landscape Architecture

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    This is an archived copy of the 2024-2025 catalog. To access the most recent version of the catalog, please visit http://catalog.iastate.edu.

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    Overview

    Landscape architecture is an environmental design discipline. Landscape architects actively shape the human environment: they map, interpret, imagine, draw, build, conceptualize, synthesize, and project ideas that transform landscapes. The design process involves creative expression that derives from an understanding of the context of site (or landscape) ecosystems, cultural frameworks, functional systems, and social dynamics. Students in our program learn to change the world around them by re-imagining and re-shaping the landscape to enhance its aesthetic and functional dimensions, ecological health, cultural significance, and social relevance. The profession addresses a broad range of landscapes in urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness settings. The scale of landscape architecture projects varies from broad, regional landscape analysis and planning to detailed, individual site-scale designs. The curriculum at Iowa State prepares students for this challenge as they develop their abilities to design and communicate ideas through a sequence of foundational courses and studios. The program seeks to produce graduates who understand the ethical, social, and environmental/ecological dimensions of issues involving changes in the landscape.

    Graduates are active in a broad range of careers, such as sustainable site design, land development, park management, environmental advocacy, community planning, urban design, and others. In their professional lives, graduates apply their creative and technical skills in the planned arrangement of natural and constructed elements on the land with a concern for the stewardship and conservation of natural, constructed, and human resources. The resulting environments serve useful, aesthetic, safe, and enjoyable purposes. Graduates are able to communicate effectively with colleagues in the sciences and humanities as well as in the allied professions and are prepared to work individually and in multidisciplinary teams to address complex problems dealing with the cultural/ecological environment.

    The department offers graduate and undergraduate degree programs and cooperates in the undergraduate minors in Design Studies, Critical Studies in Design, and Digital Media. 

    The undergraduate curriculum includes one year of the college’s Core Design Program followed by four years in the professional program. Applicants are reviewed on the basis of academic performance and a portfolio of original work; admission to the professional program is subject to the approval of a faculty committee at the completion of the Core Design Program. Information on admission criteria is posted each year on the College of Design website.

    Following admission to the professional program, students embark on the traveling studio during the fall semester of their second year. This studio is a full semester’s credit of integrated departmental courses and involves extensive travel within and beyond the great Midwest region of North America, to study regional natural systems and the cultural responses to those systems.

    To enhance the study of landscape architecture in off-campus settings, the department requires students to choose from among the following options during the spring and summer of their fourth year: 1. a professional internship 2. the College of Design Rome Program 3. an independent study abroad experience or 4. National Student Exchange. The department assists students with placement, and additional information is provided through the department and the College of Design’s Career Services Office.

    The undergraduate program consists of a five-year curriculum, requiring 150 credits, leading to the degree Bachelor of Landscape Architecture. These credits are distributed between a one-year Core Design Program of 30 credits and a four-year professional program of 120 credits.

    Student Learning Outcomes

    • Understand and practice design as an iterative process.
    • Design landscapes as part of the built material world from concept to detail.
    • Select and use a wide range of manual and digital techniques to communicate ideas; utilize appropriate communication and representation techniques based on the design problem.
    • Present a project clearly and concisely to a client, community, or user group and produce professional communications.
    • Produce basic construction documents and other project documentation including plans and specifications.
    • Incorporate knowledge of ecology and plants into design proposals.
    • Understand and practice landscape architecture as a continuously changing historical and cultural activity.
    • Interpret how social, cultural, and political dynamics affect the use and design of public and private space.
    • Function effectively in collaborative and multidisciplinary settings.
    • Practice professional ethics, judgment, and skills and understand the professional’s role as a fiduciary.