Cornell University - Department of Landscape Architecture

The Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University is one of the oldest and most renowned in the United States. Since its establishment in 1904, the department has achieved national recognition for its progressive teaching pedagogies and forward-looking approach to the field of landscape architecture. Pursuant to the university’s Land-Grant mission and commitment to fostering both research and public engagement, students of landscape architecture at Cornell are able to both draw upon and contribute to cutting-edge research with real-world implications. As one of 10 programs nationally to first receive academic accreditation by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 1939, Cornell has remained committed throughout its history to preparing our graduates to become skilled practitioners, educators and researchers, poised to address a range of critical issues affecting the planet ranging from sea level rise, flooding, water scarcity and cultural heritage to land rights and environmental justice. We believe that landscape architecture can provide the grounding for a better, more democratic society. The reputation of the department is based on the university’s egalitarian ethos and the extraordinary people who have taught and studied at Cornell over its long history. These include Professors Liberty Hyde Bailey, the department’s founder; Gilmore D. Clarke, who oversaw its evolution; as well as Marvin I. Adleman and Peter Trowbridge, whose long teaching careers guided and inspired so many of our alumnae and alumni. Building on this tradition of excellence, our faculty is a dynamic group of renowned educators and leaders in the fields of ecological infrastructure, planting design, materiality and construction techniques, fabrication technologies, design visualization, landscape history, and fieldwork methods. Beginning with Edward Godfrey Lawson, a Cornell student and faculty member who became the first recipient of the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome (1915), the department also counts several recipients of this prestigious award, including three current members of the faculty. Our students and alumni are equally extraordinary: They include David Williston (1898), the first professionally-trained Black landscape architect in the United States whose career included site planning and campus development for dozens of historically Black colleges and universities across the United States; Ruth Shellhorn (1933), among the first women to undertake major municipal projects who was personally hired by Walt Disney to design the comprehensive Main Street plan for Disneyland; Lawrence Halprin (1939), who received the National Medal for the Arts, the nation’s highest honor for an artist; and Michael Van Valkenburgh (1973), one of the most important landscape architects practicing in the field today.