Landscape architects make a direct, tangible, and positive impact on the world. Today, critical questions concerning urbanization, dwindling resources, environmental justice, and changing climate patterns have brought landscape architects to rethink their own practices and expand their theoretical engagement. Design and planning projects are increasingly systemic and projective, addressing economic, social, cultural, and physical factors over large scales and long time frames.
Landscape architects are concerned with issues ranging from food security to decaying infrastructure to climate adaptation. Collaborating with complex multidisciplinary teams, landscape architects need broad historical knowledge of designed and vernacular landscapes, creative design intelligence, and technical precision to analyze existing worlds, design projectively and systematically, and visualize new futures. This competency requires a nimble education system—one that endows students with professional skills while fostering connections across disciplines.
The Landscape Architecture Section at the Knowlton School supports individual student development through a rigorous, hands-on design curriculum that encourages critical design thinking, both conceptual and technical. For more than 100 years, Knowlton Landscape Architecture has bridged practice and research by embracing Ohio State’s land-grant mission and enabling students to imagine new landscapes, the systems that feed them, and the human and non-human communities that seek to thrive within them. We aim to prepare students to challenge how and why our environments are being shaped, and to see design as an important tool to advocate for more inclusive, just, and resilient landscapes.
