Ohio State University Architecture

Landscape Architecture at The Ohio State University will soon turn 100. It is a time to celebrate, to reflect on our achievements and define our future ambitions. As a designer, educator, and historian, I am extremely pleased to lead the landscape architecture section during this exciting time.

The current environmental questions concerning urbanization, dwindling resources, and erratic 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. Collaborating with complex multidisciplinary teams, they require broad knowledge and specific expertise. This dual competency requires a nimble education system—one that prepares students with professional skills while fostering connections across disciplines.

As a land-grant institution, The Ohio State University is well placed to bridge practice and research. The historical kinship between landscape architecture and agricultural sciences combined with the university’s focus on research has promoted a solid culture of design. Building on this foundation, we intend to support making as well as meaning, cultivating environmental citizens, thinkers and practitioners. It is in the critical examination of landscape architecture’s relationships to technique, art, ecology, and theory that we can advance the discipline academically and professionally.

We work with a cadre of dedicated and young faculty who are attuned to current environmental questions and engaged in the practice—both theoretical and applied—of landscape architecture. Together with distinguished visiting professors they offer a broad range of pedagogies, research, and knowledge. I look forward to sharing these resources with you.