The Master of Landscape Architecture Program teaches students to design land and land-based practices that advance environmental and social justice in a time of climate and public change.
Landscape Architecture
Students earning an MLA degree at Pratt are taught to embrace an inclusive approach to design that bridges culture and nature, ecology and policy, living and built environments. With so many challenges at hand, and underfoot, we prioritize collaborative and team-based learning, articulating changes between large scale systems, expansive historical precedents, evolutionary processes, and individual organisms. Landscape Architecture is a discipline, a profession, and a practice that informs the environment at every scale. We celebrate this legacy by imagining global education as a collaboration with the soils, plants and waters that sustain species.
Career Opportunities
The program aims to enable graduates to enter the profession with a sophisticated portfolio of flexible skills, knowledge and understanding.
Graduates from the MLA program progress to work in design practice and landscape stewardship both nationally and internationally, as well as contributing to academia and aspects of governance of a wide spectrum of landscapes across a broad range of scales.
Our Faculty
As educators, our most important task is to determine how we can create equitable learning for all students, which includes diverse ways of knowing. Our program is supported by colleagues, students, and professional associations that work through civic engagement and respects the traditional and unceded homeland of the Lenape people. In a time of great uncertainty, we are certain that our relationship to the land requires our complete attention. See all Graduate Architecture and Urban Design faculty and administrators.
-
Rosetta S. Elkin
Academic Director, Landscape Architecture Program; Associate Professor
-
Mariel Collard
Assistant Professor
-
Mark Heller
Assistant Professor
-
Signe Nielsen
Adjunct Professor
-
Bill Logan
Visiting Professor
-
Melody Stein
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Jeffrey Hogrefe
Professor
-
Ellen Garrett
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Martha Desbiens
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Andy Lee
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Elliott Maltby
Adjunct Associate Professor
-
Lucas Mertehikian
Visiting Assistant Professor
Success Stories
Moving Dirt, Shaping Worlds
Article
Ready for More?
| HERE’S HOW TO APPLY | OUR CAMPUS & BEYOND |
|---|---|
| Join us at Pratt. Learn more about admissions requirements, plan your visit, talk to a counselor, and start your application. Take the next step. | You’ll find yourself at home at Pratt. Learn more about our residence halls, student organizations, athletics, gallery exhibitions, events, the amazing City of New York and our Brooklyn neighborhood communities. Check us out. |
ARCH-806 | Advanced Design Research Studio: The Afterlives of Extraction | Final Review
This sixth-semester studio challenges MLA and M.Arch students to collaborate in the production of disciplinary work of high quality and sharpened resolution. The course examines agroecology as a form of design and aims to test landscape architecture and architecture as disciplines that build on agroecological practices.
The extraction of resources from earth has been recognized as the most consequential driver of ecological change and a primary driver of violence and inequality across the planet. This studio explores how designers can play a key role in the transition to a post-extractivist world by imagining new ways of living and working that integrate agroecological practices and principles. Student work focuses on a site in Austin, Texas known as the Dog’s Head, which in anticipation of mining operations coming to a close, is being explored for future development.
Projects in the studio’s final review included a century-long plan going from ecological succession to an agriculture fields and pastures for raising livestock; a proposal to use symbiotic fungi for large-scale phytoremediation; an agroecological cooperative that coordinates the farming of small incubator fields; an Andre Voisin-inspired homestead designed to allow for close monitoring of bison grazing patterns; and more.
Course instructor: Phoebe Lickwar
Co-teacher: Elliott Maltby
Student work by: Ana Julia Chiriboga, Hanme Cho, Quinn Gregory, Nell Heidinger, Joyce Hsu, Rida Khan, Colin Kroll, Noelle LaDue, Tiger Lee, Daniel Montoya, Ankit Muhury, Zoe Tank
Guest critics: Larissa Belcic (Nocturnal Medicine UPenn), Matt Donham (NYC Dept. of Parks and Recreation), Miranda Mote (UPenn)
Pratt MLA critics: Mariel Collard, Mark Heller
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
22 hours ago
LAR-806 | Directed Project II | Final Review
In the final-semester option studio Directed Project II, students have an opportunity to develop and articulate their own landscape-oriented design practice. Projects extend established research to examine landscape architectural topics, practices or sites that are undergoing transformation or under considerable pressures for change.
Patrick Belli’s proceeded from a near-future scenario in which Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood is hit with a major storm and overwhelmed with flooding. Taking license from two flood-based sections of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), he proposed a plan in which residents who are forced to leave the area are offered buyouts, and the land is redeveloped as marshlands and expanses of upland shrubs in order to protect against increasingly likely storms and flooding in the future.
Chase Mitchell’s project followed from his fascination with industrial and residential ruins throughout the Hudson Valley. Now being reclaimed by nature, these sites express a sort of dual authorship—the mingling of the living and built environments—and function as case studies in post-industrial succession. Rich in metaphorical and architectural potential, ruins possess a trove of resources for how designers can intervene in and collaborate with the natural world.
Course instructor: Mark Heller
Guest critics: Harriet Harriss (Pratt GCPE), Phoebe Lickwar (UT Austin/Pratt GALAUD), Clelia Pozzi (Pratt GALAUD)
Student work by: Patrick Belli, Chase Mitchell
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
2 days ago
Taking Stock: Outposts from the US Nursery Industry
On Monday, Leah Kahler (2024-2025 McHarg Fellow in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania) joined us for a lecture on her current research.
Leah discussed the nursery industry and expanded on the provenance of a Philadelphia street tree—a swamp white oak's incredible journey from Nebraska, to Oregon, to Pennsylvania. She presented alternative models and organizations that grow trees otherwise and invited us to consider how the profession of landscape architecture might engage with these practices in meaningful ways.
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
2 weeks ago
LAR-752 | Professional Practice I
Second-year students in Professional Practice I develop foundational skills in drawing standards and methods of practice in landscape architecture. Throughout the semester, students document a design intervention from Schematic Design to Design Development and finally Construction Documentation.
The site in question: the LeFrak Center landscape within Prospect Park. At the end of February, Christian Zimmerman, the Vice President of Capital & Landscape Management at the Prospect Park Alliance gave us a tour of the landscape highlighting the history of landscape design and layers of projects that have shaped the park we know today.
Last week, students pinned up their Design Development drawings for a special guest review with Martha Desbiens, Associate Principal at Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects.
Course instructor: Melody Stein
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
3 weeks ago
Last Thursday we had the privilege of hosting Mary Miss for the fourth installment of our Landscape Seminar Series. Miss is an artist and designer who since the early 1970s has challenged how artists can play a more central role in addressing the complex social and environmental of our times.
After giving a short presentation on the conceptualization, development, and execution of some of her key projects, Miss answered questions from faculty member Elliott Maltby and members of the audience.
Throughout the discussion, she shared insights on seeking funding for large-scale works, considering one’s work in hindsight, her relationship to the land-art canon, maintaining a creative practice over the course of half a century, and more.
One key piece of advice that Miss offered to young artists and designers: “Knowing how to dance is very important.”
Many thanks to Mary and Elliott, and to all who attended and contributed to a wonderful discussion.
Works shown:
1. Broadway: 1000 Steps, New York City, 2009–ongoing.
2. Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, Nassau County Museum, 1977–1978.
3. Greenwood Pond: Double Site, Des Moines Art Center, 1989–1996.
4. Watermarks, Milwaukee, WI, 2015–present.
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
4 weeks ago
Attention, admitted students! You’re invited to attend an immersive, 2-week long primer in landscape architectural mediums prior to the semester kicking off.
This hands-on, studio-based course meets 9:30am-6:00pm Monday-Friday with one Saturday site visit totaling almost 60 hours of instruction time in Pratt’s classrooms, fabrication labs, and outside in the landscapes of Brooklyn.
Landscape Mediums Primer will be hosted by Pratt MLA faculty member Melody Stein, and will include:
— Landscape analysis and representation through land-based learning exercises
– Multi-media fabrication and model-making
– Sketching and drafting skill-building
– Crash-course in digital modeling
Find more info and sign up via the link in our bio.
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
4 weeks ago
LAR-774 | Landscape Research II
Landscape Research II is a research workshop course that aims to define the limitations, parameters and opportunities of design by framing their proposals within a discourse
on scholarly, professional, and/or academic landscape architectural research.
In the second half of the semester, students learn animation and filmmaking methods, enabling them to create short films that advocate for new ideas of public-ness.
Here students screen their films exploring how both the design and culture of Brooklyn's Prospect Park has changed throughout the decades. Topics of inquiry include seasonality, recreation, urban development, habitats, grading and drainage, and viewsheds.
Course instructor: Mark Heller
Images by: Anna Sheikh, Chrissy Lifton, Tim Nottage
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
1 month ago
LAR-780P | Geospatial Landscapes
Students in the elective course Geospatial Landscapes devise 3D workflows for visualizing landscape systems and data. The sample workshops include a drawing of land values per SF surrounding Brooklyn's Prospect Park, categorized by land use, as well as an extrusion map of the EPA Air Quality Index for Greater New York City in 2024.
Submissions for the "Expository Aerials" assignment ranged from terrain models of the Saudi-Yemen border zone to LiDAR material investigations of Brooklyn to mapping snow-melt drainage in California's Owens River Valley.
Course instructor: Mark Heller
Student work shown: Tim Nottage, Fedha Taqi
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
1 month ago
LAR-704 | Land Studio IV: Park
The fourth-semester core studio refines the issues of environmental justice, health, and well-being by enacting design at multiple scales within the large park. Starting with a series of studies that analyze ownership, management and contextual-specific practices across a range of precedents, students speculate what a 22nd-century large park looks like and design the potential of expansion and adaptive maintenance by using Prospect Park in Brooklyn as a model.
The intertwined crises of the last five years have laid bare the need to radically rethink who and what our public parks are for. Confronted with increasingly cascading climate and political crises, the 22nd park must take on new approaches to collective participation, gathering, and care in its design and therefore a requisite reconfiguration of the systems that underlie its forms.
Leading up to their Mid-Review, students implicated and represented detail drawings of Prospect Park, done earlier in the semester, within a larger material network through a series of individual, large-scale drawings and models.
Ultimately, students will propose a reconfiguration of their material networks that examine how their details are implicated in systems of food, agriculture, waste, transportation, and/or drainage, and how a re-design of it would implicate shifts in public use, access, and relationships to the park.
Course instructors: Andy Lee, Brad Howe
Student work shown: Chloe Kellner, Connor Jacobs, Christine Lifton, Tim Nottage, Payton Prendergast
Mid-Review guest critics: Maura Lucking (Temple Hoyne Buell Center, Columbia), Darlene Montgomery (Snohetta)
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
@synthetic_milk
1 month ago
