Head's Message
Greeting from M. Elen Deming
Welcome to the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We invite you to visit our beautiful campus, situated in the heartland of North America--a region of contrasts where industrial agriculture meets tallgrass prairie remnants, where the historic railroad line between Chicago and New Orleans intersects the information highway of the 21st century. In fact, the University of Illinois was recently ranked first among "America's Top Wired Colleges" (PC Magazine and Princeton Review, 2008). Close metropolitan ties with Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis connect us to distant places in South America, Europe, South Asia, and the Pacific Rim. With a large and diverse student population living in a friendly small-town community, we are in touch with many different types of landscapes and people.
As one of the oldest and most storied programs of landscape architecture in the world, we proudly celebrate our 100th anniversary in 2008-09. We have graduated well over 1,200 distinguished alumni, many among the best-known and most successful landscape architects in modern history. The Department of Landscape Architecture is regarded as one of the leading graduate-level academic and research programs in North America, and our alumni and faculty have gone on to teach and direct programs at many other major universities.
In recognizing the rich history and achievements of our alumni and faculty at Illinois, however, we also actively engage a rapidly changing world in landscape architecture. Emerging conditions in both society and environment are having a profound impact on design practices. The scale of planning and thinking in our field is larger, more complex, and more ambitious than ever before. Never has our work as landscape architects been more important or more visible.
This is an exciting time to become a landscape architect, and an exciting time to be at the University of Illinois!
Our Department is well known for its breadth, depth, and vision of scholarship combined with practice in landscape architecture. Our programs feature the full spectrum of design and planning scales--(from private yard to public space to international cultural heritage conservation), problems--(from ecological restoration to community design to global warming), and technologies--(from physical models to dynamic 3-D visualizations to digital video and podcasts). Outstanding leaders in their specialties, faculty members are also supportive and accessible to students. Our programs are enriched by symposia and conferences, lectures by visiting practitioners and researchers, internships, field trips, design charrettes, and other events. As students develop the critical, creative, and practical skills necessary to enter the profession of landscape architecture, they also have opportunities to meet top scholars, current thinkers, and exciting designers in the field.
The Department of Landscape Architecture offers superbly-equipped design studios in a contemporary building that fosters a professional and interdisciplinary design culture. Part of the College of Fine and Applied Arts, we are housed with the School of Architecture and Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and in league with performance artists and designers in other media and departments at the College. Advanced post-professional study options add depth to our course offerings, while our Landscape Studies minor allows connections with students from many different majors. Finally, many departmental scholarship programs are available to support individual student research, travel, and service initiatives.
So, whether you wish to work toward a five-year professional degree (Bachelor of Landscape Architecture), pursue graduate professional study with supportive faculty mentors (Master of Landscape Architecture), or advance new scholarly frontiers (PhD), you will see how each of our programs complements and strengthens the whole department. Please take some time to explore our web site, especially links to student work, featuring research and design by future leaders of the profession. We encourage your questions, and welcome you to contact us and plan your visit!
Elen Deming
