Programme summary

Career opportunities

Courses & timetables

Admission requirements

[MLA]

9, 240 2.0
Full-time for 18 months (minimum) or part-time for two-and-a-half years (minimum)
Starts February
8 places
First round of interviews will be held in November
CA2304
Mt Albert campus

NZ$ 5949

International fees

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Programme summary

Explore design research in landscape architecture at a post-professional level, primarily suited to experienced landscape architects.

Are you a qualified and experienced landscape architect who wants to take their practice to a new level? The Master of Landscape Architecture introduces you to the world of design research at a postgraduate and post-professional level, and key contemporary approaches to landscape architectural design and urbanism. It’s ‘research through designing’, ‘research by design project’. You develop the skills to carve out a particular focus of investigation that can contribute to landscape architecture, the world and your own professional development.

Highlights

• Focus on design.
• Intended to act as a springboard for design leaders, design researchers and design educators.
• The only postgraduate landscape architectural programme in the northern part of New Zealand.
• Emphasis on real-world projects, fieldwork, and the practice of landscape design in a complex and dynamic world.
• Primarily designed for qualified and experienced landscape architects but suitably qualified designers from other disciplines (with appropriate experience) and strong recent landscape architecture graduates can also apply.
• Significant emphasis on ‘modes of practice’ and how to approach design problems.
• Focus on landscape architectural urbanism.
• A collaborative working relationship with the Master of Architecture, which is also developing an urbanistic emphasis.
• An intimate, collegial and mobile design research culture. Attention is given to generating an intense ongoing and supportive discussion of design work, key issues and techniques in seminar and studio modes.
• Individual supervision in a design studio environment.
• Dedicated workspaces for full-time students in our refitted 24-hour access studio space.
• The programme distinguishes itself from coursework-heavy professional masters programmes, which provide introductory professional qualifications, and from Master of Urban Design programmes, which in Australia and New Zealand tend to focus on  one particular way of approaching urban design.
• Design research is an emerging area and this is one of the few landscape architectural design research programmes in the world. It is the only postgraduate landscape architectural programme in the northern part of New Zealand.
• Staff: the Programme Leader founded the first post-professional design research degree in landscape architecture at RMIT University, won design awards for public projects, published widely, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania at the invitation of James Corner.
• A supervisory team with strong abilities in design processes, modes of practice, urbanism, the use of representation, open systems thinking and ecology.
• Critique at regular workshops and examination by local, national and international critics.
• Access to quality digital design tools.
• Part-time study available.

Seminars and workshops

You don’t need to have a fully developed research project when you begin the programme – you have the first semester to fine-tune your proposal. During this time you work in a seminar and studio format, exploring key problematics, approaches and techniques of designing and design research, initial analytical and design forays, laying out a field of inquiry and identifying a focused way to investigate it, and developing and presenting a research proposal.

Once your proposal has been accepted, you work with a formal supervisory team towards presentations to design critics at a series of workshops across the year. A seminar runs parallel to the formal supervision. Each workshop provides advice on the progress of the investigation and the next steps. Once your project is considered to be sufficiently developed, you exhibit it publicly and create a finishing document and verbal presentation.

Fred Tschopp Senior Scholarship

Each year, the owner of the best first-year Master of Landscape Architecture portfolio is offered this fees scholarship, given to Unitec by the family of pioneering landscape architect Fred Tschopp.

 

Portfolio requirements

If you are invited for an interview, you will be asked to present a portfolio of your design work.

You should be ready to discuss your professional history, the ideas within your work, your interests and the area of research by design that you are considering.

You should have a significant portfolio of professional work that will enable you to reflect critically on your practice.

Need a little more help with your portfolio?

Follow our portfolio hints and tips on what to include, what not to include and how to lay it all out.