The College of Design offers comprehensive undergraduate and graduate study in architecture, graphic design, experience design, industrial design, media arts, design and technology, and graduate studies in landscape architecture, through several degree programs, including the Ph.D. in Design. The College employs a selective admissions process that ensures a highly motivated and strong design community. As a result, entering design students consistently rank a the top of academic achievement at the University, and their graduation rate is the highest at NC State University.
The Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning (LAEP) program delivers core and advanced design studios, seminars, and free electives in and outside the department that expose students and faculty to multiple learning experiences in the Research Triangle Region, the many historic and contemporary urban destinations of the Southeast, the NC State University European Center in Prague, and interdisciplinary programs in Greece and Chile. The curriculum provides students with the intellectual capacity coupled with technical and form-giving “design know-how” expected and required to create innovative, long-term solutions focused on human and ecosystem health and quality of life.
Students have unique opportunities for intellectual and professional development wherein they learn to design and test innovative, long-term solutions to landscape problems including adaptation to climate change, increasing, or decreasing population shifts, and resultant impacts on transportation, water, and energy supply and consumption, transportation systems and land use; place-making, and the promotion of environmental justice, and social wellbeing.
We prepare students to enter the profession of landscape architecture and environmental planning as it is currently practiced, and, by virtue of our emphasis on evidence-based inquiry and design thinking, to engage, and participate in propelling the profession into the future as it changes and develops in response to environmental changes and societal imperatives. We expect graduates to apply their talents to advance the knowledge and capabilities of the profession and to be competent, entrepreneurial, and competitive in the job market and within their communities.