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
-
Jacob Suissa
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Benjamin Goulet-Scott
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Bill Logan
Visiting Professor
-
Melody Stein
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Jeffrey Hogrefe
Professor
-
Ellen Garrett
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Marissa Angell
Visiting Assistant Professor
-
Sanford Kwinter
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 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
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
@phoebelickwar
@thread_design
4 days 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)
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
@mrri_njmeadowlands
@marielilla
2 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.
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
@thread_design
2 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.
@prattfarmtocampus
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
3 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
@prattsoa
@prattgalaud
@prattinstitute
@williambryantlogan
@studio_visit_
1 month ago
We’re pleased to have Andy Lee teaching the fourth course in our studio sequence, Land Studio IV: Park, for the Spring 2025 semester.
Andy has been no stranger to Pratt MLA since the program’s founding—he’s joined many of our reviews as a guest critic, and in the Fall 2024 semester he taught the elective seminar Media Landscapes, which explored landscape as a medium through which vision creates our political and ecological realities.
Andy is a Brooklyn-based landscape architect whose practice integrates curatorial and filmic approaches to explore the cinematic body and film’s role in shaping alternative landscapes amid the climate crisis. He is currently the Emerging Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellow 2024-2026, and was the 2023-2024 Fellow in Architectural Activism at the U of Wisconsin. He has been recognized with the 2020 Charles Eliot Traveling Prize from Harvard GSD and the 2019 Honor Award from ASLA.
Land Studio IV: Park, 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 context-specific practices, students speculate what a 22nd-century large park looks like and design the potential of expansion and adaptive maintenance by using Prospect Park as a model.
Works shown:
1. “American Disorientation,” designed in collaboration with PROPS Supply and through funding from UW Milwaukee and Harvard GSD.
2–5. “*memory loss*,” single-channel film projected onto a large-scale immersive panoramic of translucent panels exhibited at the University of Wisconsin.
6–7. “Tracking Across the American Desert,” featured in the Journal of Architectural Education, and work from the publication was featured by the Museum of Modern Art and the Icelandic University of the Arts.
8–9. “American Re-mediation,” a multi-channel film installation made in close collaboration with communities in Mexico, Colombia, and Arizona. Funded and exhibited through the Emerging Curator Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
2 months ago
Attention, Pratt Undergraduate Architecture students! This Monday, February 3 at 12:30pm, we're hosting a UA info session about the field of landscape architecture and the Pratt MLA's unique contribution to land-based learning.
Join us in the MLA space on the lower level of Higgins Hall for a conversation with MLA faculty. Pizza and refreshments provided!
This session is being held specifically for students currently enrolled in Pratt's UA department who are interested in learning more about the field of landscape architecture.
Find the event RSVP and more information via the link in our bio.
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
@prattinstitute
2 months ago
Pratt MLA excited to be hosting multidisciplinary designer Walter Hood for a conversation in Higgins Hall on Wednesday, February 5. He will be joined by Matteo Milani (Pei Cobb Freed + Partners) and Signe Nielsen (Pratt MLA / MNLA) for a discussion on the topic of his newly published book “The African Ancestors Garden: History and Memory at the International African American Museum.”
This event is a co-presentation in collaboration with Pratt’s Undergraduate Architecture department.
Designed to honor the lives and legacies of the African diaspora, the African Ancestors Garden at the International African American Museum integrates cultural symbolism, native plants, and evocative spatial forms. This conversation will examine the creative process behind this living memorial, highlighting how history and memory are embedded within the design to foster reflection, healing, and connection. Through its layered narratives and immersive experience, the garden creates a contemplative space that bridges past and present while inspiring dialogue about identity, heritage, and community.
Walter J. Hood, a multidisciplinary designer from Charlotte, NC, is globally recognized for his contributions in art, landscape architecture, urbanism, and research. Founding Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA in 1992, he now leads as its creative director.
The event is free and open to the public and will feature a book signing after the conversation, so we encourage attendees to bring their copies. The book is available now at @headhi_ny (on Flushing Ave., close to the Brooklyn Navy Yard).
Event details:
Walter Hood: The African Ancestors Garden, in conversation with Matteo Milani and Signe Nielsen
Wednesday, February 5
6:15pm
Higgins Hall Auditorium, 61 St. James Pl., Brooklyn
RSVP via the link in our bio.
@prattinstitute
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
@hooddesignstudio
@mnla_landscape_architects
2 months ago
For her contribution to the final review for Land Studio III: Borough, second-year student Chloe Kellner presented her project Building Brooklyn’s Backyard. Chloe argues for the value of building park space in vacant lots to create a more equitably dispersed park system.
In doing so, she proposes a landscape based method for handling the often lead-contaminated soil of these spaces. Lead is immobile in neutral to alkaline soil, but is absorbed into roots of plants in acidic soil.
In neutral soil, thicket-forming plants like staghorn sumac discourage human interaction with contained soil, and sumac’s shallow, wide spreading roots will help prevent soil movement. Areas with acidic soil would be mounded with clean topsoil. She continued to share strategies that fueled discussion among guest critics and students alike.
@prattsoa
@pratt_galaud
@prattinstitute
@chl0e.a
3 months ago
