Stephen Billings
Principal
Stephen Billings has over twenty years of design and project management experience within the fields of architecture and landscape architecture. After graduating from the Syracuse University School of Architecture, he travelled west to work with Paulo Soleri on building the Arcosanti Project in the desert north of Phoenix. He developed his interests in materiality and hand-crafted built form by working directly in construction of this prototypical city. Later, he worked as an architectural designer with notable architectural firms in Los Angeles including Dean Nota, Hodgetts and Fung, Rockefeller-Hricak, and Richard Meier and Partners. His interests in the intersection between architecture and landscape architecture led him to the Harvard Graduate School of Design. It was during this pivotal period of study and subsequent work with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in New York that his work began to focus on the experiential and phenomenal qualities that landscape architecture can bring to specific places.
Stephen returned to Los Angeles in 2006 to work with Pamela Burton & Company, Landscape Architecture. During the next eight years he collaborated with Pamela Burton to design and manage over a hundred projects throughout the United States, Brazil, Australia and Mexico, including corporate and medical campuses, courthouses, universities, parks, performing arts centers, large scale residential projects and estates. He gained the necessary skills to thoughtfully design, detail and construct landscapes built to last.
In early 2015 Stephen left Pamela Burton & Company as Director of Design to form Stephen Billings Landscape Architecture. This new platform allows him to investigate new ways to solve complex environmental challenges and to explore landscape architectural designs that incorporates ecology, water resource management, and sustainable design practices to create performative landscapes. His work focuses on amplifying the experience and perceptions of each site through manipulations of topography, use of plant materials and built form.
Stephen is currently teaching a graduate landscape architecture design studio at University of Southern California. He has taught landscape architecture at Harvard University and Otis College of Art and Design. He has served on architecture and landscape architecture design juries at UCLA, Southern California Institute of Architecture, USC and Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Education
Master of Landscape Architecture – Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA
Bachelor of Architecture – Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
License
Landscape Architect, State of California #5351
LEED Green Associate
Membership
American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)
American Institute of Architects (AIA)
San Vicente Design Review Board Member
Los Angeles Urban Forum
Westside Urban Forum
Brentwood Community Council, Land Use Committee
South Brentwood Residents Associate, Advisory Board Member
Stephen Billings
Principal
Billy
Security
Jason Thompson
Designer
Jessica Nguyen
Project Manager
Sarah Ferreter
Project Manager