Azzurra Cox

Azzurra Cox is a registered landscape architect and writer interested in the power of landscapes to shape and reflect collective narratives. During her six years of practice at GGN, she worked on urban-scale projects across the country, including San Francisco’s India Basin Shoreline Park and its Equitable Development Plan framework; Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood Green Plaza; and Milwaukee’s Public Museum. Through this work, Azzurra explored how both the process and product of landscape architecture can deepen relationships between communities and their places — and in so doing can amplify existing power, lift up layered histories, and spur grounded activism. 

Azzurra brings a range of experiences in the worlds of publishing, curation, and design activism to her practice and research, which centers the myths and memories that live and are expressed in the land. In 2016 she was named the National Olmsted Scholar by the Landscape Architecture Foundation for her research on African-American burial grounds in St. Louis. Her writing has been published in Places Journal, where she is currently Landscape Architecture Critic-in-Residence, CityLab, and others. Azzurra has taught in the landscape architecture program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, in the Department for Human Centered Design and Engineering at University of Washington, as well as at Project Link, a program that connects Boston-area high schoolers from underrepresented communities to a studio-based summer design course. Azzurra also served on Seattle's inaugural Central District Design Review Board and as Urban Design Commissioner on the Seattle Design Commission, reviewing all city capital-improvement projects. Azzurra is from Florence, Italy, and Charlottesville, VA, with more recent chapters in Seattle and Detroit.

Education

MLA, Harvard Graduate School of Design (2016)

BA, Social Studies, Harvard College (2006)

Selected Publications

https://placesjournal.org/article/detroit-mounds-monuments-and-mourning/

https://placesjournal.org/article/field-notes-on-design-activism-7/