Billie Faircloth
Billie Faircloth is a Cornell Atkinson Scholar and Senior Faculty Fellow at Cornell Atkinson, and Associate Professor in the Architecture department at Cornell AAP.
Billie Faircloth, FAIA is a design leader and educator who has transformed practice-integrated research and earned a national and international reputation for demonstrating its value, methods, and outcomes. As co-founder of the research nonprofit Built Buildings Lab, Faircloth represents the value of existing buildings in public consciousness, global sustainability practice, and policymaking. From 2008 – 2024, Faircloth was partner and research director at the Philadelphia-based practice KieranTimberlake, where she led the collaborative development of award-winning studies, technology, and architecture. Faircloth serves on the Board of Directors of Building Transparency, has previously served on the AIA Committee on the Environment (AIA COTE), and was chair of the committee in 2022. 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. Faircloth was previously an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at several institutes including Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Royal Danish Academy, and The University of Texas at Austin. Faircloth served on the AIA Committee on the Environment (AIA COTE) from 2020–24 and was chair of the committee in 2022. Her present work focuses on socio-technical interactions between building culture and the environment and architecture’s outcomes as critical grounds for innovation.