Billie Faircloth: Sustainable No More — Practicing the Consequence of Truth

Strauch Visiting Critic in Sustainable Design Lecture

Abstract

Architects are robustly engaged in “boundary-spanning” work. They are challenging the gaps and limitations of architectural knowledge and building the capacity to internalize the external consequences of design, engineering, and construction. Having embraced works of care, climate action, and environmental justice, what is the unfolding truth of our models and methods, and their impact on design and form? KieranTimberlake Partner and Research Director Billie Faircloth will unpack these statements by examining her firm’s daily experiments and various projects and sharing insights from a practice 40 years in the making committed to empowering designers and clients through research.

Bio

Strauch Visiting Critic Billie Faircloth is a design leader who has transformed practice-based research and earned a national and international reputation for demonstrating its value, methods, and outcomes. As partner and research director at the Philadelphia-based architectural practice KieranTimberlake, Faircloth leads the firm’s Research Group, a transdisciplinary team recognized for applying research, design, and problem-solving processes from fields as diverse as environmental management, industrial ecology, chemical physics, materials science, and sculpture. Her central message: inquiry is a new-found form of professional agency and a driver for practice transformation.

Architectural Record celebrated Faircloth’s relentless pioneering of integrated, transdisciplinary research in practice when it selected her as its 2017 Women in Architecture Innovator Award winner. She is an Adjunct Professor at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Chair Emeritus of the AIA Committee on the Environment. Her present work focuses on socio-technical interactions between building culture and the environment and architecture’s outcomes as critical grounds for innovation.

THIS LECTURE IS PART OF THE DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER IN SUSTAINABLE CITIES SERIES COSPONSORED WITH CORNELL ATKINSON CENTER FOR SUSTAINABILITY.