Behind the Practice

I didn't start here.

I started in Rio — a city where two urban forests live inside city limits, where the ocean, a bay, and an inner lake shape daily life, and where walkability wasn't an aspiration, it was and still is how the city is structured. Besides Rio I was inspired by my architecture professors who were also municipal planners in practice, not just in theory. One of them was Jaime Lerner (our commencement professor)— the man who designed Curitiba, later its mayor and governor, and a visiting professor at Harvard and Berkeley — who built a city around transit, pedestrian life, and nature before anyone was calling it best practice.

Stadslab European Urban Design Lab

Then the Netherlands, for my Master's, because the Dutch have been solving these problems at every scale for generations. Stadslab followed — an European Urban Design Lab - created to help municipalities to accelerate transformation using methods that work in months, not decades. One of the phrases that stays with me comes from Lucio Costa, designer of the city of Brasília (Brazil): "I'm a pragmatic visionary" he said when I asked him how one goes from vision to implementation on such a large scale. Costa's phrase is still so useful when we consider the type of innovations needed in our cities in terms of transportation, housing and climate resilience.

Curated by Juliette - Creating Multiscale Environments

Now I'm based in Huntington Beach, working at the intersection of interior design and urban systems. The question I keep returning to is the same one I had in graduate school: how does the way a city is shaped affect how people feel and live?

That question is the founding premise of Curated by Juliette— an multi scale interior and urban design consultancy dedicated to helping homeowners, communities, municipalities, and decision-makers find tangible, lasting answers. Specializing in Vision to Implementation Accelerator Strategies, tackling such topics as urban programming, heat island mitigation, urban reforestation and bioclimatic resilience. We bring international urban transformation methods into local, implementable design. 

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