Course summary

This forward looking and innovative MLA Landscape Architecture is a Conversion Masters that offers applicants who wish to make a career change the opportunity to qualify and become a professional landscape architect. The MLA Landscape Architecture course provides you with opportunities to explore responses to climate change emergency and biodiversity loss, and help in planning and designing meaningful, fair and resilient landscapes, places and communities of the future. Exploring these themes and issues is central to our common future and our Landscape Architecture course is very well placed to build employability skills that will position you at the forefront of these subjects. The course stimulates a design studio culture and encourages high levels of research, design innovation, creativity and distinct ownership of ideas and concepts. We put an emphasis on contemporary practice and real-world projects aligned to develop the critical integration of theory and practice across scales, from landscape planning to master planning to detail design. We invite applications from students from any disciplinary background. What's covered in this course? This Conversion Masters is professionally oriented and has two stages: Year one is structured to develop key design and communication skills that support all aspects of projects in a studio-based learning environment which is underpinned by landscape history and theory lectures. Students will learn that landscape is a sequence of interrelated designed environments connected by land, ecology, water, climate and infrastructure, sitting in a cultural context that extends from parish to global, political and economic systems. The design skills will develop from process-led narratives using industry standard visual communication and analysis techniques, which include digital mapping and three-dimensional modelling, model making, virtual reality, visualisation, rendering, drawing, and design across the range of scales. Year two builds on the foundation of knowledge and skills acquired in year one and will help you develop further the creative, artistic, technical and intellectual abilities through a diverse range of design projects that explore contemporary issues, which grow in scale and complexity. The format of studio learning is continued with an increased emphasis on research and experimentation. Design themes include research-led design projects relating to landscape health and well-being, habitat creation and biodiversity, climate change, settlement design and food security, as well as large infrastructure schemes like High Speed 2 (HS2) and the West Midlands National Park. Our modules, including our new Design for Climate Change module, provide a fascinating forum for systems scale interventions, innovation and exploration of new sustainable approaches to respond to the climate change emergency, imaginative solutions to extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and for the planning and designing of ecologically inspired places and communities. Our links to industry, local authorities and our Co.Lab partners offer an opportunity for you to be involved in the complex nature and challenges of being a landscape architect in the real world. These extend to collaborating with local stakeholders and institutions and working alongside colleagues across the University on projects that demonstrate the authority of Landscape Architecture in improving the quality of future urban and rural living.