Landscape Architecture, Environmental and Urban Design Academic Department
The Department of Landscape Architecture + Environmental and Urban Design trains professionals committed to crafting a more sustainable, equitable, and beautiful built environment. We tackle the most pressing challenges of our time including climate resilience and social equity through critical scholarship and creative placemaking. We design the spaces that shape the human experience.
Our rigorous programs of study foster creativity, promote collaboration, refine critical thinking skills, and instill an ethos of social engagement. Our faculty demonstrate through award-winning research and design a commitment to FIUs mission as a public urban research university. We are the only landscape architecture program in the United States specializing in tropical and subtropical landscapes, climates, geographies, and ecologies.
As the only American metropolis bordering two national parks, and with its unique location in the subtropics, Miami is perfectly suited to studying tropical landscapes. The rapidly growing urban context of Miami whose commercial and cultural ties put it at the center of the Western Hemisphere provide a laboratory for exploring the social dimensions of landscape architecture and urban design. As the American city most threatened by sea level rise, Miami offers an opportunity to establish global models for the integration of climate resilience in the design of our landscapes and cities.
Our fully-accredited Master of Landscape Architecture degree includes three tracks that allow students to enter as Freshmen, or with an Associates degree, a non-professional undergraduate degree, or a professional Bachelors degree in a design field. Our Master of Arts in Urban Design is a post-professional degree for design professionals who seek to expand their expertise. Students in the Department of Landscape Architecture + Environmental and Urban Design have access to extraordinary facilities, including the design studios at our home in the Paul L. Cejas School of Architecture Building, our interdisciplinary educational sites in Miami Beach and Wynwood, our digital Fabrication Lab, our 3D printing Innovation Lab, our Robotics Lab, and our immersive virtual reality studio. Our students collaborate with their peers in the School of Architecture, and across the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts. Many take advantage of our study abroad opportunities in Latin America and Europe, and most students undertake internships or work professionally during their studies. With robust job growth and impressive salaries forecast for the next decade, landscape architecture and urban design offer exceptional professional opportunities for students who want to make the world better through creative design and environmental stewardship.