Billie Faircloth is a design leader and educator 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, Billie 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.
Billie is an Adjunct Professor at the Weitzman School of Design in the Environmental Building Design program and the Robotics and Autonomous Systems program. Billie’s present work in practice and academy focuses on socio-technical interactions between building culture and the environment and architecture’s outcomes as critical grounds for innovation. She is a co-chair of UIA2023’s Climate Adaptation panel, Chair Emeritus of the AIA Committee on the Environment, and a member of the Board of Directors for Building Transparency.
Her articles have been published by the Journal of Architectural Education, Princeton Architectural Press, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and ACADIA. She is the author of Plastics Now: On Architecture’s Relationship to a Continuously Emerging Material published by Routledge in 2015, and the recipient of Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Innovator Award in 2017.