Department news

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.

Early last month, our Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois Provost Andreas Cangellaris, Dean of Fine and Applied Arts Kevin Hamilton, Landscape Architecture Foundation CEO Barbara Deutsch, and Morton Arboretum Landscape Architect Susan Jacobson gathered to celebrate the investiture of Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles as the first Debra L. Mitchell Chair in Landscape Architecture.

We are proud to announce that the Smart Energy Design Assistance Center (SEDAC) has won a 2018 Illinois Sustainability Award for its work to reduce energy consumption across Illinois. Landscape Architecture Professor and SEDAC Executive Director Brian Deal received the award on behalf of SEDAC.

Congratulations to Designer-in-Residence Aneesha Dharwadker, who will be joining us as an Assistant Professor, beginning this month, through a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and the Department of Landscape Architecture.

Registration is now open for Fresh Water, an exciting design symposium coming up September 13–15, 2018, hosted by the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois.