May 16-19, 2018  |  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Hosted by Temple University in partnership with Jefferson University and Drexel University
Chair: Kate Wingert-Playdon, Temple University

Billie Faircloth is a partner at KieranTimberlake, an award-winning architecture firm recognized for its environmental ethos, research expertise, and innovative design and planning. As the firm’s Research Director, she leads a transdisciplinary group of professionals that leverage research, design, and problem-solving processes from fields as diverse as environmental management, chemical physics, materials science, and architecture. Within this group, Billie fosters collaboration between disciplines, trades, academies, and industries in order to define a relevant problem-solving boundary for the built environment. In her professional and academic research, she is constantly pursuing an answer to the question: “Why do we build the way that we do?”

Billie has published and lectured internationally on themes including research methods for a transdisciplinary and trans-scalar design practices; the production of new knowledge on materials, climate, and thermodynamic phenomena through the design of novel methods, tools, and workflows; and the history of plastics in architecture to demonstrate how architecture’s “posture” towards transdisciplinary practices and new knowledge has changed over time.

Her articles have been published by the Journal of Architectural Education, Princeton Architectural Press, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and ACADIA. Her book Plastics Now, On Architecture’s Relationship to a Continuously Emerging Material, was published by Routledge in June 2015. Billie has taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Harvard University, has served as Portman Visiting Critic at Georgia Institute of Technology, and VELUX Visiting Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Prior to joining KieranTimberlake, she was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, where she instructed research studios exploring applications for conventional and emerging material technologies and conducted seminars on emerging construction and fabrication technologies.

Sean Griffiths is the director of the provocative art-architecture collaborative FAT whose design work and art projects have been widely and internationally published, exhibited and discussed. Besides his prolific architecture and design projects, art work, media work and his regular curation of group exhibitions and installations, Sean Griffiths has taught extensively both in this country and as visiting critic and professor and as invited lecturer in institutions around the world. He has also contributed to books, journals and magazines worldwide.

Nigel has been with Foster + Partners since 1990 and has worked on a range of projects across North America, Europe and the Middle East. He led the design for both the McLaren Technology Centre and Production Centre in Woking. Nigel has expertise in Education, Research and Medical Facilities including Yale School of Management, Clark Center at Stanford University and the Patient Pavilion for Penn Medicine, Philadelphia. Recent projects include 425 Park Avenue, Comcast Technology Center and the New International Airport Mexico City. He is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.

Contact

Direct inquiries to:
Joon-Ho Choi
conference@arcc-arch.org