BIG Landscape Architecture (Bjarke Ingels Group) partner Giulia Frittoli spoke to New Zealand landscape architects last week.

Giulia, who has been with BIG since 2017, has a multi-disciplinary background in urban design, architecture and landscape architecture.

She presented an NZILA Streetscape Webinar on March 11 on Urban Landscapes. The video for this webinar can be viewed in the CPD section of the NZILA website or below.

Description of webinar:
As public space and biodiversity are subtracted to urban spaces, BIG-L works with architects and other disciplines to integrate the built and natural worlds, connecting people to people, and people to nature. With every project, we go beyond the brief to give the gift of public space to the communities in which we work, creating equitable and accessible public spaces for all. Our work does not just respond to today’s challenges, but mitigates future challenges too, addressing nature loss, climate change and societal inequities. We approach every project as an opportunity to use nature-based solutions for social and technological integration, community building, ecology and preservation, biophilia and biodiversity enhancement to design sustainable, smarter and safer cities.

Giulia was made a BIG partner last year and is seen as an instrumental leader within the business. She moved to BIG Copenhagen in 2020 after three years with the company in New York.

She led the proposal for Toyota Woven City. LAA did a piece on this project in 2020. The project investigated how recent technologies will shape the future of cities in regard to new forms of mobility, sustainability, ecology and human connectivity.

When Giulia first joined BIG in 2017 it was as project lead for the design of Islais Hyper-Creek proposal for the Resilient by Design competition, exploring solutions to adapt and protect the Bay Area from rain flooding, rising sea levels, and other environmental risks. You can see a video about that work, below.

BIG says her approach “brings focus to urban and natural systems, questioning and rethinking the traditional approach to landscape and city planning.”

Other relevant work by Giulia includes the masterplan for the Coliseum Arena in Oakland; the masterplan for Ravenswood Waterfront in East Palo Alto; and the Vision Plan for Downtown Brooklyn Public Realm. LAA covered the Downtown Brooklyn project in 2020.

Before working at BIG, Giulia worked for four years as a Landscape Designer and Urban Planner for the Dutch firm West 8. She received her Masters Degree with honours from the Polytechnic University of Milan.

Thank you to Streetscape our speaker series sponsor.