MLA Open House
On May 10 the Landscape Architecture Department will host an MLA Open House. Please attend if you are interested in a graduate degree in Landscape Architecture.
More information on the event is here.
More information on the MLA program is here.
MLA Application Deadline Extended
The Department has extended the application deadline to the MLA program. If you've missed the previous deadlines please send in your applications or contact .
Capstone Presentation Schedule
Our final design studio is the "Capstone" of our MLA student's educational experiences, allowing them to explore individual and independent design/research topics as a demonstration of their interests and abilities collected through their coursework. Capstone reviews will take place Monday May 7 to Thursday May 10. Presentations begin at 9am in the Rapson Courtyard.
Cities on Water Students to participate in Marker Wadden project
Roel Posthoorn, a Dutch professionals who has been working with the Cities on Water course, has recently organized a project to improve the ecological quality of the Markermeer, a 270 square mile lake near Amsterdam. Roel works for the Natuurmonumenten (Nature Monuments), a private group that works closely with the national government in protecting natural areas and providing recreational opportunities.
The Marker Wadden project was awarded funds through a national competition to begin construction of a series of islands that will improve water quality and provide aquatic and terrestrial habitat for many species, as well as recreational opportunities for people. The funds came from the national Postcode Lotttery, which funds nature, humanitarian, and international projects each year. The Marker Wadden project requested 5 million euros, and the "Dreamfund" competition awarded them 15 million euros. The entire project is estimated at 65 million euros.
Preliminary concepts and engineering ideas were presented for the competition, but no spatial planning has been done. Arrangements are now being made for Cities on Water students to take on this assignment and generate a schematic master plan for the project. The students will present their results at the national headquarters for the Natuurmonumenten in late March.
Research Assistants in Practice
Students and faculty in our Master of Landscape Architecture program are known for their transformative community engagement design and planning work. Ranked by Design Intelligence as among the most admired, "for its community engagement, strong environmental focus, and scholarship aligned with education."
The Twin Cities leads the nation in the making of an accessible, strong, connective, multi-functional and resilient public landscape particularly focused on water resources. The Department of Landscape Architecture has teamed with three organizations whose mission it is to protect this legacy to create Research Assistants in Practice.
Meet the 2011-2012 RAs in Practice
Tom Campbell is working with The Trust for Public Land Minnesota (TPL) http://www.tpl.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/minnesota/, a state branch of the national, nonprofit land conservation organization. TPL is leading efforts create The Gateway - a linear park that will transform underutilized properties near the Minneapolis Central Library and better connect downtown Minneapolis to the Mississippi River.
Tiffani Navratil is working with MLA alumnus Doug Snyder, Director of the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization http://www.mwmo.org/ (MWMO) to develop a mapping and a series of vegetative management plans (VMP's) for the Minneapolis parks system. The MWMO is charged with enhancing the water quality of the Mississippi River watershed in the Twin Cities.
Colleen O'Dell is working this fall as a Research Assistant in Practice for Metro Blooms in Minneapolis. www.metroblooms.orgShe is researching the feasibility of an endowment to fund perpetual maintenance of raingardens and other green infrastructure in the metro region.
Giving
To contribute to the RAs in Practice fellowship or other department fellowships give here.
MLA Program Among Most Admired
Design Intelligence ranks the graduate landscape architecture program at UMN among the most admired “for its community engagement, strong environmental focus and scholarship aligned with education.”
UMN MLA in the News
See coverage of the Students for Design Activism's work with Gordon Parks High School at the Daily Planet. Visit the website of our Students for Design Activism here.
Our Students are Amazing
There are many reasons to choose the UMN MLA program, but the number one reason is our amazing students. They arrive with a wealth of experience from undergraduate studies and careers in fields like environmental science, studio art, literature, architecture, and urban studies—and a belief that landscape architecture can change the world for the better. Our studios are collegial places where each person helps the other out—the artist helps the engineer sketch, the engineer helps the literature major calculate stormwater runoff, the literature major helps the artist and engineer craft research proposals. In their final year, as each student develops their capstone project, we get to see how they bring their values, aspirations, and design skills to bear on projects that address significant environmental and social issues. Each becomes a master of a different aspect of design—and can use their capstone project as a launching-point into practice. Download this booklet to see some of our amazing students' amazing work.
Interested in Urban Design and Asset-Based Development?
Graduate Students Kristen Murray and Kevin Clarke are co-hosting a
design charette around community development, pop-up storefronts,
transit planning, and economic
development in a vacant storefront on St Paul's University Avenue.
"University Avenue is the city's primary commercial corridor, and construction of the Central Corridor light rail transit line is taking a heavy toll. The vacancy rate in storefronts on University Avenue is around 25 percent—what will happen to surrounding neighborhoods if that rate gets worse? Does the process of building a light rail line destabilize communities to an extent that hamstrings the benefits once the line is completed? What can be done to mitigate that?
We are developing a project that tries to address these issues, and you're invited to participate. This project, currently named Starling, takes an asset-based view on commercial vacancies and the construction schedule for the Central Corridor. We are creating a positively-branded project that addresses landlords' concerns about making their spaces available to short-term tenants at below-market rents.
Our goal is to define and promote a supply of vacant storefronts on University Avenue for short-term tenants of all kinds—entrepreneurs, artists, start-ups, community groups, etc. These storefronts will be readily identifiable from the street by some uniform design element(s), and custom storefront displays will tell the story of what's happening inside."
Interested in Sustainable Design and Landscape Architecture?
See the work of faculty member Lance Neckar and graduate student Derek Shilling on the Zero+ Campus Design Project. "Zero+ describes buildings and places that generate excessive energy over the course of a year. This is related to the principals of regenerative design, which stipulate the need for buildings to produce excess resources (i.e. energy, water, clean air, et cetera) to truly create a sustainable society."