Landscape Architecture Resource

What kind of education do you need to become a landscape architect?

How much education do landscape architects have or need?

In North America, Landscape Architecture is often done as a bachelor's degree in 4 or 5 years. The pre-requisites differ from school to school, but generally it would be advisable to have taken some senior year art classes in high school and some sciences as well. Geography is closely related to landscape architecture, too. But Landscape Architecture is such a broad field that you'd be well-served by any high-school curriculum. As long as your grades are good. Admissions to Landscape Architecture programs are usually pretty competitive, again depending on the school. If you're still in high school and think you're interested in landscape architecture as a career, check ahead to see what kind of classes will help you the most at the schools you're interested in.

Many schools (and the number seems to be rising, at least in Canada) offer Landscape Architecture only at the graduate level. This means you'll need a bachelors degree in something else before you can apply to the Masters of Landscape Architecture program. You can enter with virtually any undergraduate degree, again as long as your marks are good. In my masters class, we had people with all kinds of undergraduate degrees: jazz performance, forestry, geography, biology, philosophy, engineering, architecture, divinity, and fine art. Believe it or not, these are all advantageous backgrounds to be able to bring to landscape architecture. When you design human habitat for a living, everything else becomes a related topic, as I've written about before. My masters of landscape architecture class modeled for our school's website one day in studio. I'm in the blue shirt.

It's good to have some construction experience, too. You're going to be drawing blueprints for things to be built; the more you understand about how they will be built, the better you'll be at designing them.

You should have some knowledge and interest in plants, but in fact plants are a rather small (but important) part of what we do, in the grand scheme of things. It's never too late to learn how to identify and care for plants, but you'd rather start as soon as there is much to learn.

I would advise working at a nursery, a landscape construction company, the local city parks and recreation department, the city planning department, or a landscape architecture firm as an intern or assistant if at all possible. The more you know ahead of time, the better prepared you'll be and the more you'll get out of your landscape architecture education once you do get in.