Thesis, Master & Comprehensive Project Resources

Master’s or Thesis Projects

Master’s Project Overview and Guide

Students are encouraged to discuss possible topics with faculty at the earliest opportunity. Students may also take independent studies and reading courses with faculty while formulating the project.

To explore recent student projects, please see the Terminal Projects List.

For a list of past Master Projects, visit the Landscape Architecture Gallery.

You can also view completed Landscape Architecture Ph.D. dissertation and MLA theses.

Comprehensive Project

The comprehensive project is the culmination of BLA students’ design education and serves as the capstone experience for undergraduate majors. The comprehensive project allows BLA students to demonstrate entry-level professional competence in design development and communication across scales of a real environmental planning and design project. The comprehensive project gives students an opportunity to identify, formulate, research, manage and communicate a finished design project of their own total making.

The comprehensive project covers two terms. During the Fall term, students go through the design development phases of the project by establishing benchmarks and a statement of outcomes. Students are expected to identify their project before the start of LA 499 in Winter.

The Winter term (LA 499) combines instruction in design theory with the development of the student’s own comprehensive project program. The winter term provides the studio setting in which students professionally realize, through a relevant and appropriate design process, a strong design response to their own comprehensive project program.

At the conclusion of the comprehensive project, students will have demonstrated:

• Individual selection of a multi-scaled project in which the student takes the lead and bears the major portion of the responsibility for scheduling and managing their work.
• Execution of a more complete project than the usual one-term studio allows, with better programmatic, precedent and developmental materials, and a good rehearsal of the way that people will experience the place being proposed.
• Successful completion of an opportunity to focus on programming, to pay closer attention to designing as a process, and to consider more deeply the many value dimensions of landscape architecture and their expression in landscape form and pattern.
• Their most mature effort at organizing and giving a public presentation of a complex design project.