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.
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Rosetta S. Elkin
Academic Director, Landscape Architecture Program; Associate Professor
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Mariel Collard
Assistant Professor
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Mark Heller
Assistant Professor
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Signe Nielsen
Adjunct Professor
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Jacob Suissa
Visiting Assistant Professor
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Benjamin Goulet-Scott
Visiting Assistant Professor
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Bill Logan
Visiting Professor
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Melody Stein
Visiting Assistant Professor
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Jeffrey Hogrefe
Professor
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Ellen Garrett
Visiting Assistant Professor
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Marissa Angell
Visiting Assistant Professor
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Sanford Kwinter
Professor
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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)
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2 days ago
Happy spring! Pratt MLA students are all over the map: from the brownfields of New Jersey to Prospect Park, from mine spoils to library archives. As did Williams Carlos Williams, we welcome “Spring and All.”
We were especially thrilled to meet some of the future of our field yesterday during our Admitted Students Day event, and we’re proud to be growing skills, testing to failure, and maintaining our commitment to land-based learning.
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5 days ago
LAR-613 | Cartography II: Soil Making
Earlier this semester, first-year students visited the High Line in lower Manhattan a part of the second course in our Cartography sequence. The trip served as an opportunity to study the history and context of the famous converted greenway, and to examine its soil composition and the planting design that best suits it.
This first section of the course, which also includes a visit Gerritsen Beach in east Brooklyn, aims to help students learn about and acknowledge the unique and novel character of urban soils, where most exposed soils have been dramatically changed by human beings.
Course instructors: Bill Logan and Melody Stein
📷: @dannen.b.plantn
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@studio_visit_
1 week ago
MLA students recently attended the 2025 Pratt Spring Career Day to learn about opportunities and experiences from over 100 companies around NYC. We were grateful to connect with Bayview Landscape Architecture, Hart Howerton, LaGuardia Design Group, LVF, Snohetta, and Supermass Studio, and more!
Reminder: The virtual component of 2025 Spring Career Day is coming up on March 28 from 10am-8pm, so be sure to register to talk to any firms you may have missed at the in-person fair!
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1 week ago
ARCH-806 | Advanced Design Research 2 | The Afterlives of Extraction: Cultivating an Equitable Future for East Austin’s Colorado River Corridor
In this advanced architectural design studio, third-year MLA and M.Arch students work together in order to understand agroecology as a form of design. Through extensive work in the field and in the studio, they test landscape architecture and architecture as disciplines that build on agroecological practices and make connections across design, farming, and land stewardship.
The studio focuses on a site within the boundary of the Colorado River Corridor known as the Dog’s Head. This site, named for the shape of the land outlined by the Colorado River, is composed of 3,000 acres of mining, ranchland, and residential neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Tesla Gigafactory, just five miles from downtown Austin. In anticipation of mining operations coming to a close, the area is being explored for future development.
However, much of the Dog’s Head lies within the flood plain and the transformation of its mining lands for high intensity development would require a significant infrastructural investment. Furthermore, the East Austin communities that have lived in and amongst the noise and pollution of the mining industry for decades have little to gain from the types of development that are being proposed.
Back in February, students spent a week in Texas taking part in a series of drawing and photography workshops and field surveys at the Dog’s Head and other sites along the Colorado River that included nature preserves, environmental research centers, and farms.
Once back in the studio, students compiled their field research along with a personal narrative to tell the story of the site through an investigation of its materiality.
Course instructors: Phoebe Lickwar, Elliott Maltby
📷: Phoebe Lickwar, Noelle LaDue
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2 weeks ago
LAR-602 | Land Studio II: Shore
The second course in our core studio sequence brings attention to fast and slow processes of land formation. The semester begins by building literacy around the concepts we use to describe landscapes where land and water interface as well as the spatial conditions that define them. The objective is to understand and analyze the forces at play on the dynamic space of the shore—both as part of greater regional systems and as specific and situated cultures, politics, and ways of life.
Students have been busy drawing and modeling the shore through diverse digital and analog techniques, and recently had their first field day at the Meadowlands, hosted by our partners at the MRRI (Meadowlands Research and Restoration Institute).
Course instructor: Mariel Collard
Images shown:
1. Barrier island model by Lilabet Johnstongil
2. In-studio review
3. Field Day at the Meadowlands, Richard P. Kane Natural Area
4. Drumlin formation drawings by Anjali Britto.
5. Design case study by Raha Behnam (Renaturation of the River Aire)
6. Field Day at the Meadowlands, Richard P. Kane Natural Area (photo credit: Lindsey Dannenberg, @dannen.b.plantn)
7. Wetland formation drawings by Raha Behnam
8. Model-making process: cnc milling and casting
9. Barrier island model by Lilabet Johnstongil
10. Field Day at the Meadowlands, Richard P. Kane Natural Area (photo credit: Lindsey Dannenberg, @dannen.b.plantn)
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3 weeks ago
We’re so excited to welcome artist and designer Mary Miss as the guest for the fourth installment of our Landscape Seminar Series, taking place in Higgins Hall on the evening of Thursday, April 10.
Mary Miss is one of one of few recognized women in the land art movement. Her vision has always favored site-specificity and human perception over traditional concerns of site, a novelty when she began her career as a sculptor five decades ago.
Collaboration is also central to Miss’ work, which encompasses projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, marking the predicted flood level of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City and more recently, defending the demolition of a demonstration wetlands in Des Moines, Iowa.
This event is free and open to the public.
Join us in discussion with Mary Miss and Pratt MLA faculty member Elliott Maltby to address the role of public landscapes, the complexity of maintenance manuals and the difference between repair, upkeep and demolition.
If you’d like to attend, be sure to RSVP via the link in our bio.
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@thread_design
3 weeks ago
One of our favorite auxiliary features of campus life is the Pratt Farm to Campus produce program. Each week, mostly local fruit, vegetables, herbs, eggs, and seasonal items like maple syrup and honey are delivered to our Brooklyn campus and are available for purchase by students, faculty, and staff.
This week's bounty: purple sweet potatoes, carrots, fuji apples, shallots, spinach, shiitake mushrooms, and red beans.
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4 weeks ago
LAR-613 | Cartography II: Soil Making
“Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.” —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
In the second meeting of their class Cartography II: Soil Making, our first-year students headed to Gerritsen Beach in eastern Brooklyn to learn to examine filled land, assess flood risk, and read the history of a site through its soil.
Using their field observations, soil testing results, and indicator plants, students wrote essays describing the state of the landscape as influenced by the compositional history of its soils. Throughout the project, students also learn to perform basic colorimetric pH tests to assess what pH says about the area’s plant palette, and imagine what restoration of a landscape and a place might look like.
Course instructors: Bill Logan and Melody Stein
📷: @dannen.b.plantn
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1 month ago
