About The Program
The Landscape Studies Program at Smith, the first in a liberal arts undergraduate college in the United States, joins architecture, landscape architecture, landscape history and theory, art, art history and literature with the sciences and social sciences to investigate critical issues.
Students study the great landscapes of history throughout the world, as well as local communities, to better understand the evolving relationship of humans to both natural and built environments.
Smith College has a long liberal arts tradition of searching for multiple perspectives informs and enriches its Landscape Studies courses. We believe that Smith has the most comprehensive curriculum for the study of the built environment—landscape and buildings—of any liberal arts college in the United States.
Smith's campus is a botanic garden and an arboretum, an historic landscape designed by the firm of Frederic Law Olmsted, the creator of Central Park. Our museum, libraries, rare book room, the campus itself, and our curriculum together form a unique, rich archive and laboratory for the study of human interactions with the spaces and places we inhabit.
The Five Colleges—Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts—are collectively a hotbed of academic, artistic and activist involvement with the environment. University professors of landscape architecture and regional planning welcome our students in their courses.
Our physical setting in the Connecticut River Valley makes us part of one of the most fertile agricultural landscapes in the country; the Valley is also a major academic, cultural and recreational area and lies 90 minutes from Boston and New York.
