The College of Architecture and Environmental Design is following a different blueprint this semester after merging the schools of architecture and landscape architecture.
Department officials merged the School of Architecture and the School of Landscape Architecture into the tentatively titled School of Architecture and Landscape Design starting this semester.
Tim Le, a landscape architecture junior, said he is worried the merger will bring a new architecture-specific curriculum that, as a landscape student, he is unfamiliar with.
"We're competing into upper division with landscape and architecture students," Le said. "It's a whole different ballgame from what I learned last year."
Prior to the merge, the landscape program was grouped with the School of Planning but there was such a large overlap between the architecture and landscape programs that the faculty recognized their similar mission and the obvious connections, said Wellington Reiter, dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design.
"There was unanimity about the benefits of doing this," Reiter said. The school's four-year degree program is broken up into two parts, said Anna West, academic advising coordinator for the college.
The first two years of the program will offer similar ,though not identical, programs to both architecture and landscape architecture students with many of the same courses cross-listed for each program, West said.
The curricula for studios, or architecture labs, for the degree programs also have been redone to incorporate both disciplines.
West said this would give the students more options when applying to the upper-division program, allowing them to apply to either.
"With the merger, it opens up more options to the students," West said. "It just seemed like a logical merger ... the studio has been restructured so that it incorporates both."
Once in the upper-division courses, students will see more specialized courses according to their particular topic of study, West said.
She said students should not be worried about competition between the two groups because students who followed the lower-division landscape architecture program would likely apply to the corresponding upper-division program. She also said students would not have to repeat classes for credit and their previous courses would fulfill revised requirements.
Reach the reporter at rkost@asu.edu.
