By LA News Editor •
Landscape Designer, OLIN
The dedicated and diverse faculty insist on a rigorous, pragmatic grounding in landscape architecture. Yet within that practical learning process, each helped me to elevate my creative impulses and encouraged me to soar. I emerged from the program with the skills I need to build a career and the confidence to pursue my passions.
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Jr. Landscape Architect NY State Dept. of Transportation
As one of three of the first students in the 4+1 program, I ultimately learned that there are a multitude of unrecognized and unheard voices. Faculty members reminded me that it is not always our duty to create and design for the community, but rather be their listener. I was encouraged and guided to see outside of my design eyes and to always remember to be a human first.
By LA News Editor •
PHD Candidate, Urban Planning
Rutgers University
The flexibility of the program, combined with all of the resources available at Rutgers, allowed me to pursue my interests and follow questions to their source. I would not be on my current path without the foundation created by the MLA program and the faculty who make it what it is.
By LA News Editor •
Junior Landscape Architect at MKW + Associates
The 4+1 program taught me that there are many voices in a design and that the loudest voice should be the community who you are designing for. The faculty and staff here at the Rutgers MLA program taught me how to be open and receiving of the voices that are often ignored and to design a space that would serve their community.
By LA News Editor •
Landscape Architecture Instructor,
South Dakota State University
The Rutgers MLA provides a flexible yet rigorous course of study that challenged me while providing new insights and directions for my individual exploration. With guidance and instruction from the experienced and dedicated faculty I was able to complete my studies culminating in a thorough research effort suitable for continued exploration at an academic institution. Within one year of completing my studies, I was offered and accepted an instructor position as my first step on a new career path.
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Landscape Architect,
M/s. Prabhakar B. Bhagwat
(Landscapeindia)
The Roy DeBoer travel scholarship I received from the Rutgers MLA program provided me the opportunity to travel the Netherlands to study their water management practices. This global exposure has played a vital role in my personal development and the skills that I developed have allowed me to work anywhere in the world. In fact, I received a job offer even before I graduated with the same employer in Rotterdam whom I had interviewed for my travel prize research.
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Creative Director, National Consortium for Creative Placemaking
The Rutgers MLA program taught me about how stories in all their forms—storytelling, listening, experiencing—are critical to understanding the human experience and our relation to the land and places around us. This program has empowered me to learn…how stories are used to engage and build better communities.
By LA News Editor •
Assistant Landscape Architect at NYC Department of Parks & Recreation
The 4+1 MLA Program allowed me to further explore the interconnected nature of social categorizations as they apply to place and space. I was able to develop my interest in archival research and historical narratives, understanding the relationship of marginalized people and the built landscape. I benefited from having professors that understood my strengths and weaknesses and motivated me to continue to ask the questions that challenge the way we think about people and space.
By LA News Editor •
Landscape Designer, SCAPE
Creativity and collaboration flourished—encouraged by the diversity of scholarship inside the Department and synergies with other Departments ranging from ecology, forestry, agriculture, planning and art. It was great fit for me as a second-career student, interested in exploring the amazing breadth of interdisciplinary work in the field Landscape Architecture.
By LA News Editor •
Anette Freytag is an award-winning scholar, educator and critic and a Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture. Her research focuses on designed landscapes from the 19th century to the contemporary practice with a particular focus on topology, phenomenology, and walking. In 2019, she co-founded the AIR Collaborative (Arts Integration Research Collaborative) which prioritizes creative placemaking to foster spatial justice through projects that seek safe access to nature for all. Before joining the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers, Anette has taught undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, and both the Technical University and the University of Innsbruck. She has also lectured at KU Leuven and HSR Rapperswil.
Her latest book The Landscapes of Dieter Kienast published by gta Verlag Zurich in 2021 offers the first comprehensive critical examination of Kienast’s work and has been awarded a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize. Dieter Kienast (1945–1998) is a key figure in European landscape architecture. Amidst a striking change in societal understandings of nature, he sought a synthesis between design and ecology in the 1970s. He designed spaces to make the dissolving opposition between city and countryside legible and to enable aesthetic experience to help cope with an increasingly complex everyday life. Kienast renewed the aesthetics for designing with nature in the city through his love for spontaneous vegetation and his doctorate in phytosociology. After the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s, Kienast reoriented the profession of landscape architecture with form driven designs while reinforcing plant knowledge. The German edition of the book Dieter Kienast. Stadt und Landschaft lesbar machen published by gta Verlag Zurich in 2016 has received the DAM Architectural Book Award, the German Garden Book Award / Best Book in Garden History and was selected as one of the “Most Beautiful Swiss Books” by the Swiss Confederation.
Anette is the editor and main author of The Gardens of La Gara. An 18th century estate in Geneva with gardens designed by Erik Dhont and a labyrinth by Markus Raetz published by Scheidegger & Spiess in English, German and French in 2018. It is a case study to explore, through the prism of one estate, all aspects of garden culture. It has received the European Garden Book Award 2019. Anette is the co-author of Pamphlet 15 Topology (Zurich: gta Verlag 2012) and co-editor of Landscript 3 Topology (Berlin: Jovis 2013).
Anette holds the ETH Medal Award for Outstanding Scientific Research and the Theodor Fischer Prize for Outstanding Research on the Architecture of the 19th and 20th Centuries, awarded by the Central Institute of Art History in Munich. Her work has been supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, the ETH Zurich, the Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt Foundation, Rémy and Verena Best, the Federation of Swiss Landscape Architects (BSLA-FSAP), the Christoph Merian Foundation, ProHelvetia and the Rutgers Research Council. Apart from her work in academia, Anette founded the research bureau ville.jardin.paysage in 2001 and delivered a highly regarded study on the garden of Stoclet House (1905-11) created by Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte in Brussels. Her study resulted in the inscription of the garden as protected site in 2005 and contributed to the inscription of the architectural ensemble on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
Curriculum vitae
List of publications and lectures
anette.freytag@rutgers.edu