Julie Parrett
Senior Lecturer and Graduate Program Coordinator, Landscape Architecture
While focusing on public urban projects in professional practice and teaching, Julie’s work explores landscape architecture as a practice that incorporates innovative landscape and ecological strategies as a framework and model for designing dynamic landscapes which evolve over time. At the base of this approach are the fundamentals of design – the physical and spatial qualities created. The challenge is to create places that are articulate, site specific and well-crafted while remaining adaptive and open.
Currently as a Lecturer in the Dept of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, Julie’s teaching investigates connections between reading and seeing landscapes and design methodology. As a practicing landscape architect, Julie heads a small consultancy firm and has previous professional experience developing award-winning and visionary large-scale public sites and urban planning projects as well as intimate neighborhood parks. As Design Director for the People’s Waterfront Coalition, an organization she helped to co-found, she developed an award-winning proposal for re-envisioning Seattle’s downtown waterfront without the Alaskan Way Viaduct as a dynamic water’s edge with parks, beaches, recreation paths, event space and an urban street integrated into a functional shore ecology, and a transportation solution that supports a sustainable and livable future city.
In addition to the University of Washington, Julie has taught landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She holds a MLA from the University of Pennsylvania, BS in Architecture from the University of Virginia and was a Fellow with CHORA Institute of Architecture and Urbanism in London. Additionally, Julie currently sits on the Seattle Design Commission and Seattle’s Public Art Advisory Council.