Aja Bulla-Richards is an architectural and landscape architectural designer, she works at the intersection between vast social, ecological and conceptual systems and everyday experience. Her projects question the mindset behind existing cultural landscapes and propose intensifying ecological and social narratives that reveal invaluable knowledge already inherent in the places we inhabit.   Aja received both a Master of Architecture and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, where she was awarded the ASLA Certificate Honor Award, and Architecture Faculty Awards for Design Excellence and Community Service. Her recent MSArch thesis work “Connect the Dots” with the Arid Lands Institute won a Great Streets Grant from the city of Los Angeles.  She has worked for architecture, landscape and urban design firms in Berlin Germany , Oakland CA, Sonoma CA, Charlottesville VA, and Los Angeles CA. Aja’s ongoing research continues to explore how we can re-imagine and redesign water infrastructure, transforming monofunctional systems into resilient socio-ecological cycles that engage and expand everyday experience, promote alternative cultural practices, and uncover latent ecological processes. She is the founder of SEEP, a design inquiry collective that utilizes multiple learning modalities to catalyze renewed relationships with natural systems; revealing landscape agency,  & generating resilient cultural ecologies.

Education

M.S. Architecture, Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University M.L.A., University of VirginiaM.Arch., University of VirginiaB.A., Architecture, University of California at Berkeley