landscape and garden architecture

At the heart of the programme are the design workshops in which you work actively and concretely. Real design issues bring you into contact with the field of landscape and garden architecture. In collaboration and consultation with clients - owners, authorities or various interest groups - you learn to think spatially in small groups with individual supervision. Gradually, you learn to analyse and synthesise design briefs in order to arrive at your own critical and substantiated vision of a specific non-built space. The range of projects is diverse and grows in complexity throughout the programme. You get to work practically in the design labs with sub-aspects such as paving, constructions and planting.

The practical learning line is flanked by course units that provide a theoretical framework to reflect critically on the assignments and provide the knowledge to carry them out. Theory is applied practically and concretely through lectures, seminars, guest lectures, practical assignments and excursions. Digital and manual visualisation techniques help you put your search process and its outcome on paper and create images that inspire. Landscape and garden architecture is also placed in a current and historical cultural perspective. There are also several other training components that will enhance your ecological, technical and plant knowledge. And course units such as work field exploration and communication or business management and entrepreneurship prepare you for the professional field. Finally, in the course of the programme there are various study visits to inspiring projects at home and abroad, to plant and tree nurseries, arboreta, etc.

As a function of the development of your personal practice, you can partly determine your own study programme through electives and workshops. You can also choose your graduation design from a variety of assignments based on your own interests. Your programme will be rounded off with an internship in a design agency, a public service at home or abroad or another leading organisation. You will also complete a bachelor's thesis: a complex design assignment in which you - with the lecturer as your supervisor - take control of your own design process. You do not need to have followed specific preparatory training or have specific prior knowledge to embark on the landscape and garden architecture programme. A love of greenery and a good dose of creativity will suffice.

The landscape and garden architecture programme will shape you into a professional ready for the job market at home and abroad. You can start work in the private sector with this degree as an employee of a design or study agency, or start your own business independently. You can also build a career in the public sector - the green or planning department of a municipality or city, a province, the Flemish Region. As a landscape and garden architect, you will be called in to design, prepare plans for implementation or, as a project manager, steer their implementation in the right direction. But you can also be deployed in permit policy, to draw up green plans or management plans or to advise on policy plans. In many cases, you will be part of a multidisciplinary team of landscape and garden architects, architects and urban planners, biologists, bioengineers and so on.

If you want to continue studying after this programme, you can take the unique bachelor after bachelor in landscape development within KASK & Conservatorium. This programme focuses on the landscape and how it can be developed through spatial design. This one-year programme forms competent professionals who have the analytical and synthetic abilities to read the landscape independently and critically and to make creative and reasoned design proposals based on this. You can also choose - whether or not after following a bridging programme - to gain further qualifications in related master's programmes such as urban and spatial planning, heritage studies or landscape architecture at home or abroad.