Professor Carl Smith Enjoys Watching Landscape Architecture Students Find Their Voice

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Carl Smith is professor of landscape architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, where he's taught since 2008.

Editor's Note: As the U of A strives to become an employer of choice, the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design is highlighting the faculty and staff who help the school excel.

Carl Smith is professor of landscape architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, where he’s taught since January 2008. He is a Fellow of the Landscape Institute and Chartered (licensed) landscape architect in the United Kingdom. He’s also a Chartered Geographer and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has wide, international experience in the practice, teaching and research of landscape and urbanism, and is co-principal of Worth Design LLC, a landscape architecture and urban design office in Fayetteville.

In addition to his primary role in the Fay Jones School, Smith is an adjunct professor of geosciences at the University of Arkansas, and he is the ArchiScape Visiting Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, UK (2020-2024).

While originally from the United Kingdom, Smith said that when he came to Northwest Arkansas, he was able to accept the region for what it was as he found it. Likewise, the region welcomed the recent arrival from Edinburgh with warmth and charm.

“I didn't have any presumptions about what it was about. I found the people to be extremely charming and the university to be extremely welcoming,” Smith said. “I turned up with two bags, that's it — no family and no friends.”

Nearly 16 years later, Smith said he is proud of the program that brought him here.

“Our students are ready and able to work in some of the best practices in the world and stand toe-to-toe with graduates from any program in the U.S.,” Smith said. “The work they do is exceptional. We are outperforming most of our peers, regionally in the central states. And in terms of accomplishments, the students are winning positions across the U.S. and overseas. Students in the landscape architecture department are becoming more aware of their quality.”

This summer, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security designated landscape architecture as a STEM degree program. STEM is short for the academic fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. While this designation more correctly identifies the work of landscape architecture programs across the nation, it also brings awareness to the work of landscape architects.

Smith said it is sometimes difficult for people to grasp the complexity of the work landscape architects do. Landscape architecture is about much more than just plants.

“It affects people's lives; it affects the health of the planet. Fundamentally, it's about trying to weave culture and nature together,” Smith said. “There's a lot of iteration and a lot of experimentation. Studios are incredibly creative places with a lot of energy. It's a unique mixture of being intellectually engaged, but also culturally engaged.”

And through his work with students in the studio, he has watched them find their voice in the design process and find something that resonates with them. The iteration process design students go through can seem magical, but it’s all a process of experimentation.

“Landscape architects have to be aware of the living, dynamic and changing nature of the world. It has a character and personality,” Smith said. “It's very important that we try and recognize that and work with it and try not to impose something that is fundamentally alien into that place.”

Design professions require a certain amount of honesty, Smith said. Through the many iterations students make, inauthenticity is stripped away. He said students also spend a great deal of time working together and with their professor on projects. Through this process, a certain level of vulnerability is required.

“To work best in the studio, you have to bring your whole authentic self to the studio, not just your intellectual self,” Smith said. “Your sense of humor, your anxieties, your hopes — you have to be fairly authentic about that. At some point, the real you comes out.”

Even after all the years, and all his accomplishments, Smith said what he is most proud of is when he has made a difference with students. And, it is that impact that has kept him at the Fay Jones School.

“I'm doing what I want to do,” Smith said. “For anything else to interest me it would have to be something creative, something with people, and something that I'm really passionate about. All of those components lend themselves to being a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Arkansas.”

Read the full Q&A with Carl Smith.