Student experience
Our students (about 40 BLA and 80 MLA) take courses that range from practice-focused studios; to hands-on courses in the technical skills (like landscape construction and digital graphics); to lectures and seminars to learn the contextual background (history and theory) necessary to become as landscape architects. They bring these together in capstones, internships, and independent research. These projects allow our students to apply the knowledge they gain and to guide their learning experience.
This page gives a sense of the experience of students in the program including a few tours of the spaces where our students work and some stories that highlight the incredible opportunities our students have participated in and created for themselves. Enjoy!
Tours of the College of Built Environments
Take a Tour of Gould Hall including the landscape studios
Take a Tour of Makerspaces at CBE
Student Stories
Power to the Pollinator Student Project
Over the past few decades, bees and other critical pollinator species have been experiencing a rapid decline in population. Natural ecosystems depend on these critters to pollinate roughly 85% of flowering species, which in turn provide habitat and nourishment for other wildlife. By gathering pollen and nectar from hundreds of flowers, pollinator species like bumble…
Fly By Night: A Designer’s Look at Bats in Seattle Parks
Sidney Greenslate, BLA ’21, completed this senior capstone research project and presented to the UW Landscape Architecture Department in Spring 2021. Inspiration: Art, Science & Creativity I was inspired to pursue this project in part by a talk given at the UW by landscape architect and designer David Buckley Borden. His playful, eye-catching installation pieces…
Celebrating Graduates | UW 2021 Gonfalonieres and Guardians of the Gonfalons
Each year the UW’s schools and colleges select students to lead their degree candidates during the commencement procession. These students are called gonfalonieres, because they carry the school’s gonfalon, a banner that hangs down from a crosspiece and bears that school’s name and symbol. Following tradition borrowed from the Italian Renaissance, the gonfalonieres represent some…
Carbon Leadership Forum Member Impact: Sofia Segebre, BLA
Sofia Segebre, BLA ’21, has been working with the UW’s Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) since April of 2020 where she’s been supporting the team with general program administration as well as facilitating community outreach and collaboration. In February 2021, Sofia shared her motivation to reduced embodied carbon admissions in CLF’s Member Impact feature. Sofia Segebre…
Around the UW Farm: Sophia Falls
Sophia joined the BLA program in 2020. When she’s not studying landscape architecture, she’s a student staff member of the UW Farm. Check out Sophia’s profile from UW Farm below! Sophia Falls, First Year Student Staff, CSA Lead Sophia is a junior at UW majoring in Landscape Architecture with a minor in Geography. She is…
Mud Gallery: Olympia Arts Month
In March 2021, three MLA students submitted this project, entitled Mud Gallery, to Olympia Arts Month in Olympia, Washington. We are a group of three landscape architecture students from Olympia, Seattle and Baltimore. We share a deep love of this region and a desire to connect people with place. We are excited about the way…
Racial Equity Within Built Environment Design Practice
In my final year of the MLA program, I’ve been given the opportunity to participate in the Applied Research Consortium (ARC), a new program within the college that links graduate students, faculty members, and firms to research a topic that aligns student interest, faculty expertise, and firm needs. I am leading a year-long research project…
2020 Capstone Final Presentations
Check out the final project briefs and presentation schedule for our 2020 MLA students capstone projects.
Equitable Public Space, Environmental Justice Through Policy and Design
Equitable Public Space, Environmental Justice Through Policy and Design (PDF) is a practical guide for community and civic leaders, city planners, policy makers, designers and project managers to address public space inequities and disparities in community conditions within the built environment. This guide explores the question of how the myriad benefits offered by public and…
2018 Building New Global Connections | Croatia Design/Build
This story originally appeared on College of Built Environments website on October 23, 2019. You can see the original story here. The UW Landscape Architecture Croatia Design/Build program gives students the unique opportunity to make a lasting, physical impact in their host community. Professor Daniel Winterbottom, an expert in the creation of healing and therapeutic…
2018 Design+Build in Dals Langed, Sweden
In collaboration with students from HDK-Steneby, a design and crafts school located in Dals Långed, 15 students from University of Washington’s College of Built Environments, led by Professor Daniel Winterbottom, worked with the local immigrant and refugee community to create a community garden intended to improve well-being, alleviate the stresses of the integration process and…
For lecturer Kristi Park, landscape architecture is for equity and activism
This story highlights the work of L ARCH 300 Intro to Landscape Architecture Studio in Autumn 2020. It originally appeared in The Daily on November 25, 2019. See the original article. When UW lecturer Kristi Park assigned her 29 students a project in their landscape architecture class, she had few requirements: use found objects, don’t…
Sensol Modular Crosswalk project selected for Amazon Catalyst Fellowship
In July, seven new teams were selected as Amazon Catalyst Fellows. The teams are a mix of UW faculty, students, and staff from eleven departments across campus. Each team received funding to pursue a big idea focused on one of this round’s themes: Computational Social Science or Urban Transportation. One winning team features CBE students, Janie Bube, Graduate Student, Landscape…
The Wild City
MLA student Sarah Bartosh asks, “How can we challenge the way that we think about designing for children’s connection with nature in our increasingly urban environments?”
Drawing in Design: Student Perspectives
Drawing in Design is a quarterly series of public lectures and weekend workshops for students that focus on representation in design and bring leading landscape architects and designers from across the country to our Department. Student Perspective: Allison Ong, MLA The workshop Alan Maskin started with a presentation about his personal history and relationship with…
Congratulations to our 2019 Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Olmsted Scholars
“Using ideas, influence, communication, service, and leadership to advance sustainable design and foster human and societal benefits.” These are the qualities of students recognized through the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Olmsted Scholars Program, considered one of the most prestigious national awards for students of landscape architecture. The College of Built Environments is proud to recognize two graduating…
Students draw from Canadian context
For one week in mid-June, students explored the similarities and differences between US and Canadian urban environments as they visited three Canadian cities: Montreal, Quebec City, and Ottawa. The field study was led by Fritz Wagner, Professor Emeritus in the departments of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design & Planning and Dr. Regent Cabana, an Affiliate Professor…
Gambling on Green: A Playground Renovation in Las Vegas, Nevada
The following article was written by MLA student Lauren Iversen for The Field, the ASLA Professional Practice Networks’ Blog. Under my wide brimmed hat, with sweat dripping, I added paint, stroke by stroke, to the long wall. My legs burned sitting on the decomposed granite roasting in the hot sun. I sipped Cool Blue Frost Gatorade,…
Red Square: re-imagining an iconic UW landmark (UW Daily)
Landscape architecture students (both undergraduate and graduate) have teamed up with students from across the College of the Built Environment and around the University to compete in the Re-Imagining Red Square Design Competition. The competition, which wraps up in early April, has six interdisciplinary teams working for nine weeks to design alternative ideas for UW’s…
What Seattle Can Learn from Denmark about Community-Owned Housing (The Urbanist)
MLA student Roxanne Glick went to Copenhagen, Denmark to study their community-owned housing model. She brought what she learned from her time living in Denmark and studying their housing system back to Seattle. Roxanne shared some of her discoveries with The Urbanist. Below is an excerpt from her article. Inspired by the community ownership movement,…
ASLA Advocacy Week 2018
UWASLA Co-President Sophie Krause (MLA ’19) and ASLA Student Representative Darin Rosellini (BLA ’18) traveled to Washington D.C. for Advocacy Week in May 2018. This year’s ASLA Advocacy Week was “Landscape Architects Creating Resilient Solutions for Every Community.”
Diversifying the Profession through K-12 Outreach
2018 MLA graduate Allison Ong shares her experience introducing students from around the Seattle area to landscape architecture as part of a project with her ASLA mentor.
Reading the Elwha 2018:BLA Course Perspective
For the last four years, Associate Professor and Department Chair Ken Yocom has brought an interdisciplinary group of students out to the Olympic Peninsula for a summer course titled “Reading the Elwha.” During a week of hiking, observing the landscape and field meetings with local scientists, land managers, and tribal members, students explore concepts of Nature and the evolving human relationship with the environment in a watershed marked by the largest dam removal project in US history. Monica Taylor, a student in the course and recent BLA graduate, shared some of her experience in this reflection.
Auburn Alleyway Activation: MLA Project
What happens when you turn an uninviting alleyway lined with dumpsters over to UW Landscape Architecture students? The city of Auburn, Washington discovered these possibilities for such a space when three 2018 MLA graduates (Allison Ong, Sylvia Janicki, and Jack Alderman) developed a proposal for an alleyway in historic downtown on an independent study project through UW Livable City Year.
Pollinator Network: MLA Capstone
Yuchia Jan received his Master of Landscape Architecture in 2018. For his capstone project, he created a concept design to explore networks of pollinators including Monarch butterflies and Rufous hummingbirds in South Seattle and along Chief Sealth Trail.
BLA student on her experience transferring to UW
BLA student Jessica Chandler answered some questions about her experience as a transfer student in the Landscape Architecture program for the Fall 2017 Transfer Newsletter.
MLA Students Participate in Architecture Summer Design-Build
Two L Arch students (Nina Mross and Jiyoung Park) took part in a summer design/build project with the Architecture Department addressing food prep in Seattle’s homeless communities.
Garden Cities: An MLA Student’s Experience
David de la Cruz is from South Central Los Angeles. His experience growing up in this neighborhood – pollution, poverty, cultivation of local foods, and community – inspired him on a path that led to a Master of Landscape Architecture.
Building a Healing Garden: BLA Design-Build 2016
In winter and spring quarters of 2016, students from the University of Washington Department of Landscape Architecture designed and built a therapeutic garden for the Puget Sound Veteran’s Affairs Hospital in Seattle. Prof. Daniel Winterbottom guided the students through this design/build capstone project. The Garden of Earth and Sky opened in June 2016.
UW LArch alumnus Harley Pan’s Floating Wetlands documentary
For the past two years, MLA student Matthew MacDonald (2016) has been studying the viability and effectiveness of floating wetlands to improve local water quality. The research has been conducted in partnership with UW Larch / UW CBE and Green Futures Lab, with support from King County, Washington Conservation Corps, and Society of Wetland Scientists….
Improving the Lives of Syrians
by Malda Takieddine (MLA Candidate ’14) As a Syrian, I’ve spent the past three years struggling to accept what is happening in Syria. In particular, I’ve been trying to find a way to contribute and help the people of my country, while I am more than 6000 miles away. As a landscape architect student at…
