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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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.
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4 days 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.
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@chl0e.a
1 month ago
LAR-703 | Land Studio III: Borough | Final Review
Last week our second-year students held their final review for the third segment of our core studio sequence, Land Studio III: Borough. The course focuses on engagement with actionable and applied learning experiences that support the long-term and intergenerational work required to unite people and place, by encouraging relationships between citizenship and plant life, with a specific focus on the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush.
The studio partners with local nonprofit BKLVLUP to develop engagement tools and provide initial feedback to students. The collaboration introduces the basic formation of a “Community Land Trust” as a model and a framework for more equitable design projects in the food and social justice space.
Projects included a plan to break up asphalt lots and mound the material into a topographically varied green space featuring plantings of serviceberry trees; a strategy for planting small parks to act as cooling centers on every block of Utica Avenue in Flatbush; and a reimagining of a network of alleyways as a small public spaces that act as catch basins for water runoff reduction; and more.
Student work by: Lesley Arevalo, Connor Jacobs, Chloe Kellner, Dong Hoon Kim, Chrissy Lifton, Tim Nottage, Payton Prendergast, Anna Sheikh
Guest critics: Gary Bates (Make Make), Rachel Goodfriend (BKLVLUP), Elizabeth Kennedy (EKLA), Peter Macapia (Pratt GALAUD), Allyson Martinez (BKLVLUP), Scott Ruff (Pratt UA)
Pratt MLA critics: Jeffrey Hogrefe, Signe Nielsen
Course instructor: Ellen Garrett (@fwd_land)
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1 month ago
LAR-601 | Land Studio I: Region | Final Review
On Monday, year-one students held the first final review of their MLA careers, for their studio course Land Studio I: Region.
After drawing, mapping, and modeling ecological histories and studying and applying precedent projects in previous modules of the course, students are aware of the challenges facing the Hudson River Estuary from industrial-era inheritances, such as degraded soils and deforestation, to pressures from contemporary development, such as suburbanization and energy infrastructure construction to impacts of warming temperatures.
In their final module, students select one condition, network, or system in the landscape and design a strategy to increase the land’s capacity for self-renewal.
Projects included mobile floating gardens used for use in bioremediation of various sites along the Hudson River; a stiching-together of streams in the Hudson River Estuary to aid in mobility of marine and human life; the fortification of the watershed in Wappinger Falls, NY with planted coppice woodlands and herbaceous plants; and more.
Student work by: Raha Behnam, Anjali Britto, Meghan Canale, Lindsey Dannenberg, Lilabet Johnstongil, Greta Lincoln
Guest critics: Tami Banh (SCAPE), Amy Motzny (DEP/Pratt GCPE), Robert Pietrusko (UPenn), Laura Salazar-Altobelli (Pratt UA), Maggie Tsang (Rice U)
Pratt MLA critics: Andy Lee
Course instructor: Mark Heller
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1 month ago
LAR-805 | Directed Project I | Final Review
On Thursday, our third-year students held the final review for their fall studio, Directed Project I. This studio is an opportunity for students to develop independent research in a topic of their own interest. The intent is to define the parameters of the project by strengthening the studio
work developed in their previous four semesters of studio courses.
The session was a silent review, so students did not explain or defend their projects, which were displayed anonymously. Critics viewed the exhibited works for a half hour, and then discussed the various projects amongst themselves.
Works included: a network of interlocking “little trails” that weave through Flatbush’s vacant lots and connecting alleys; a system of continuous, downhill pervious spaces that addresses flooding concerns in Gowanus; a redesign of public access to the Bronx River that connects it to other local sites of interest; and a plan for supplying Flatbush with an enclosed space that combines civic life with the need for rich soil and usable compost; and more.
Student work by: Patrick Belli, Ana Julia Chiriboga, Nell Heidinger, Noelle LaDue, Tiger Lee, Chase Mitchell, Daniel Montoya
Guest critics: Harriet Harriss (Pratt GCPE), Nicholas Koster (Central Park Conservancy)
Pratt MLA critics: Mariel Collard, Martha Desbiens, Ellen Garrett, Andy Lee, Lucas Mertehikian
Course instructors: Rosetta S. Elkin, Mark Heller
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1 month ago
The MLA studio is buzzing this week as students work on projects for their upcoming final reviews.
Chase Mitchell, one of our third-year students, shares his visualizations of how energy and matter are rearranged across multiple sites throughout the Hudson Valley, creating novel landscape conditions all over.
His project for LAR-805 — Directed Project I examines the future of urban ecology, and how it can be formed/informed by reading the history embedded within plant-material relationships of the many living monuments within the region.
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2 months ago
On the afternoon of Tuesday, December 17, Pratt MLA will host our final info session of the year, which will focus on three faculty members who teach in the Field Ecology, Landscape Studies, and Studio sequences of our core curriculum. It will take place on Zoom.
The session will be hosted by our Academic Director, Rosetta S. Elkin, and will feature short presentations by the following faculty members:
• Jeffrey Hogrefe, Professor (Landscape Studies)
• Andy Lee, Visiting Assistant Professor (Studio Sequence)
• Elliott Maltby, Adjunct Associate Professor (Field Ecology)
This session will differ quite a bit from the others we've hosted this semester, so we encourage you to attend even if you've been to another of our Fall 2024 info sessions. There will be time for a Q&A and conversation about the topics discussed.
If you’d like to attend, please RSVP via the link in our bio.
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2 months ago
This semester our first-year students had the opportunity to plant an Amelanchier (aka Serviceberry) tree on Pratt’s campus as part of Field Ecology I. Course instructor Bill Logan demonstrated how quickly water drains in the soil by having students dig a 12”x12” hole and running a percolation test, and then continue to prepare the hole by digging it about as deep as the root ball, and twice as wide.
Students learned how to use a chaining pin to ensure the tops of the roots are planted just beneath the surface of the soil. They arranged the tree for optimal position, removed the burlap and cage, and compacted the soil to keep the tree in place. After tying arbor ties to two stakes to help the tree establish, and then berming and mulching around its base, they finished the planting by watering the tree.
If you’d like to visit the new tree, it’s located at the corner of Myrtle and Grand Avenues, right between Blick Art Materials and the veterinary office.
Thanks very much to field arborists Isaias and Omar from Urban Arborists BTH, for all of their help!
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2 months ago
For the Spring 2025 semester, we’re pleased to be offering the second iteration of our elective course LAR-780P — Geospatial Landscapes, taught by Assistant Professor Mark Heller.
This course presents methods of mapping landscapes through the lens of data archives. Students will leverage tools of GIS, data visualization, and 3D modeling to graphically narrate powerful stories about how landscapes change over time, from ecological conditions to zones
of agglomeration. Weekly workshops introduce data analysis and visualization techniques for remote sensing, demographic and economic data, environmental and atmospheric conditions, land cover, subsurface conditions, and more. Students will learn to convey morphological, demographic, or environmental phenomena through data archives such as the U.S. Census or Landsat imagery. No prior experience with GIS is required.
LAR-780P | Geospatial Landscapes
Mark Heller
Spring 2025 | Thursdays, 9:30am–12:20pm
3 credits
Works shown:
1. Mark Heller, The Alphanumeric Sublime — The Andes of Ecuador (after Frederic Edwin Church)
2. Mark Heller, The Alphanumeric Sublime — The Icebergs (after Frederic Edwin Church)
3. Mark Heller, The Alphanumeric Sublime — Valley of the Yosemite (after Albert Bierstadt)
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2 months ago
