Rose was a high school dropout, but this didn't stop him from being accepted into Cornell University as an architecture student.
One of Rose's first major works while employed at Tuttle, Seelye, Place and Raymond was to design a staging area to house 30,000 men at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey.
After this experience, Rose turned his focus to working on private gardens that created an intimate relationship between human beings, nature, and architecture.
The time Rose spent in Okinawa during World War II and his many subsequent visits to Japan, nurtured his fondness for Japanese gardens.
While attending Harvard, Rose and his classmates, Garrett Eckbo and Dan Kiley, rebelled against the conventional landscape theory and designs.
Through these publications in the Pencil Point magazine, now called Progressive Architecture, and other later articles and books, Rose was able to spread his view on landscape theory and design.