Department news

Led by Prof. Mary Pat McGuire, the initiative is part of a growing movement to transform underused paved areas, such as empty parking lots, into vibrant, green, community spaces.

Students in our undergrad Regional Design Studio partnered with the City of Whiting, IN, and the USDA Forest Service to design plans for foresting vacant lots. So far, two have been planted, with more to come.

Three members of our department community—faculty member Kelley Lemon, current student Ana Valderrama, and alum Sonal Mithal—have been awarded prestigious grants from the Graham Foundation.

The Department of Landscape Architecture is pleased to announce the establishment of the Sofia T. Soudavanh Garden on an area of ground adjacent to our building, Temple Buell Hall.

Prof. Kelley Lemon and PhD in Landscape Architecture alumnus Dongying Li are two of the twelve faculty Research Fellows selected to study high-performing landscape projects in the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s 2022 Case Study Investigation program.

Launched in 2007 and renewed in 2019, the Red Oak Rain Garden is a magical place on our campus—even in middle of winter—to which many members of our Department of Landscape Architecture community have contributed over time—as designers, installers, maintainers, and financial supporters.

This evening, Prof. Beronda L. Montgomery delivered the second annual Terry Harkness "Plants in Design" Lecture in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois.

The Department of Landscape Architecture is pleased to announce that Kelley Lemon will be joining our faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, to begin in August 2021.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. David Hays has been appointed the Brenton H. and Jean B. Wadsworth Head of the Department of Landscape Architecture.

This year, our 2020 Sasaki Day Awards competition took place entirely online—from submissions and first-round judging to finalist presentations and voting—with participants distributed across the country and beyond.

Congratulations to our faculty members, instructors, and teaching assistants included on the Fall 2019 List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, which was recently posted by the University’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.

We are very pleased to announce that Jie Hu—Director and Chief Designer of the Research Center for Landscape Architecture at the Beijing Tsinghua Tongheng Urban Planning and Design Institute (THUPDI) and Vice-President of THUPDI overall—will be joining our faculty beginning this August 2020 to chair our new Master of Sustainable Urban Design program.

A team of 13 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students recently won an American Society of Landscape Architects award.

Congratulations to Prof. Mary Pat McGuire, Jessica M. Henson, and 21 distinguished contributors on the release of Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Pollyanna Rhee will be joining our department as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture with a focus on landscape history.

We are thrilled to announce that Susan Jacobson is this year’s recipient of the Alumni Medal from the Department of Landscape Architecture!

On Saturday, November 4, the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Illinois Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (IL-ASLA) co-sponsored Field Day Chicago, an event inaugurated to introduce high school students to the field of landscape architecture.