Shape the Landscape. Shape the Future.

The Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) program at the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design equips students with a solid foundation in design, technical skills, and hands-on experience essential for success in both public service and private practice. Through immersive service-learning projects, students engage with communities, developing the expertise and values needed to address critical health, safety, and environmental challenges.

Our MLA program also empowers students to explore their unique paths within the profession, whether by advancing as leaders in practice, pursuing academia, or pushing boundaries through scholarly discovery. With a focus on shaping resilient, inspiring spaces, the CED’s MLA program prepares graduates to excel as innovative practitioners, educators, and researchers in the planning, design, and management of the natural and built environment.

The MLA offers thesis and non-thesis options. The non-thesis option has a greater focus on research-based design. The non-thesis option will still require a defense and a positive committee vote to successfully complete the program.

The MLA program is currently housed in Denmark Hall, a historic three-level building with ADA access only to its main floor. Currently the basement and top levels of Denmark do not meet ADA requirements and are only accessed by stairs. The University is currently masterplanning a major renovation of the building to include elevator access to all floors, among other exciting improvements. In the interim, the CED will continue to fulfill the spirit and letter of ADA and meet the needs of all users by rescheduling classes and meetings to ADA spaces whenever needed. Please contact the CED Dean’s office and academic program coordinators as early as possible to notify and request schedule changes.

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Student Handbook
MLA Reading List

All students should read at least some of the following publications, or ones like them, before entering Georgia’s MLA program. They are preliminary to landscape architecture: they deal more with values and perceptions than with techniques. Some of them may be out of print and available only libraries, not bookstores; that does not reduce their value as background to landscape architecture.

Books

  • American Landscape Architecture, edited by William Tishler
  • Architecture: Form, Space & Order, Francis D.K. Ching
  • Bounded People, Boundless Lands, Eric Frey Fogle
  • Celebrating Third Place, edited by Ray Oldenburg
  • Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
  • Design with Nature, Ian L. McHarg
  • Earth in Mind, David Orr
  • Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Janisse Ray
  • Experience of Place, Tony Hiss
  • Genus Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Christian Norberg-Schultz
  • The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
  • God, Dr. Buzzard and the Boltio Man, Cornelia Walker Bailey
  • Great Streets, Allan B. Jacobs
  • The Granite Garden, Urban Nature, and Human Design, Ann Whiston Spirn
  • The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch
  • Keeping Time, William Murtaugh
  • Landscape Architecture: An Illustrated History, William Mann
  • Landscape Journal: Eco-Relevatory Design, Special Issue 1998
  • Landscape Planning – Environmental Applications, William Marsh
  • Placing Nature, Culture, and Landscape Ecology, edited by Joan Nassaver
  • The Meaning of Gardens, edited by Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester
  • A Moment on Earth, Gregg Easterbrook
  • A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman
  • A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
  • The Necessity for Ruins, John Brinckerhoff Jackson
  • Reading the Landscape of America, May Theilgaard Watts
  • Rural by Design, Randall Arendt
  • A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
  • Second Nature, Michael Pollan
  • The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William H. Whyte
  • Trees in Urban Design, Henry F. Arnold
  • Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon

Journals

  • American Forests
  • Architectural Record
  • Environment and Behavior
  • Historic Preservation
  • Landscape Architecture
  • Landscape Journal
  • Places
  • Restoration and Management Notes
  • Urban Land

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