William W. Braham
Vice Chair of the Department of Architecture
Andrew Gordon Professor of Architecture
Director MSD-EBD Program
Director Center for Environmental Building + Design
Stuart Weitzman School of Design
102 Meyerson Hall
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
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Selected Courses Taught
Profile
William W. Braham, PhD, FAIA is Andrew Gordon Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he previously served as Department Chair and Chair of the Faculty Senate, and is currently Director of the MSD in Environmental Building Design and of the Center for Environmental Building + Design.
He studied civil and mechanical engineering at Princeton before working as a solar consultant with the Princeton Energy Group. He initially came to Penn to work with Don Prowler and Harrison Fraker on a multi-year DOE research project, "Teaching Passive Design in Architecture." After completing the Master of Architecture he worked in New York as an architect for nearly a decade, eventually returning to Penn as Director of the Center for Environmental Design and Planning, while completing a PhD in Architecture.
He has worked on energy and architecture for over 40 years as a designer, consultant, researcher, and author of numerous articles and books. His research projects have featured the application of systems ecology to the built environment and the uses of building performance modelling, spanning from considerations of urban morphology to the metabolic effects of responsive building envelopes. His recent consulting projects include energy and carbon plans for the City of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Nakashima Woodworkers, and the Chautauqua Institution, and building energy modelling for the Daikin Open Innovation Lab, Silicon Valley. He has collaborated with many amazing colleagues, most recently Dorit Aviv's Thermal Architecture Lab and Henning Larsen on radiant cooling innovations.
Education
B.S.E., Princeton University
M.Arch, Ph.D. Arch., University of Pennsylvania
Certificate in Traditional Chinese Architecture, Tsinghua University
Select Publications
Books
Architecture and Systems Ecology: Thermodynamic Principles for Environmental Building Design (Routledge, 2016)
Energy Accounts: Architectural Representations of Energy, Climate, and the Future (Routledge, 2016)
Architecture and Energy: Performance and Style (Routledge, 2013)
Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (Routledge, 2007)
Modern Color/Modern Architecture: Amédée Ozenfant and the genealogy of color in modern architecture. (Ashgate, 2002)
Articles
Braham, William W., Xincheng Ye, Xiang Zhang, Linxue Li, Hwang Yi. 2026. “Building Robustness: Measuring climate-responsive performance with information theory.” Energy and Building, Available online 21 March 2026, 117351.
Hakkarainen, Max, Evan Oskierko-Jeznacki, and William W. Braham. 2026. “Evaluation of the Potential of Water Vapor to Be Used as a Tracer Gas for Determining Air Change Rates.” International Journal of Building Pathology and Adaptation 44 (9): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJBPA-04-2025-0091.
Kim, You-Jeong, Alexander Waegel, Max Hakkarainen, Yun Kyu Yi, and William W Braham. 2025. "Understanding HVAC System Runtime of U.S. Homes: An Energy Signature Analysis Using Smart Thermostat Data." Building Simulation 18: 235-258.
Zhang, Qi, Nan Ma. 2024. “A spatial analysis of ozone and PM2.5 distribution for assessing design factors of healthy buildings.” Journal of Building Engineering.
Braham, William W. Faircloth, Billie. 2024 “Environmental Building Design (EBD) Research Studio: Design Innovation for the Climate Emergency.” In Puttock, Robin Z. (ed.), Teaching Carbon-Neutral Design in North America: Award-winning Architectural Design Studio Methodologies (Routledge).
Braham, William W. Aviv, Dorit. 2024 “The Bioclimatic Design Studio.” In Puttock, Robin Z. (ed.), Teaching Carbon-Neutral Design in North America: Award-winning Architectural Design Studio Methodologies (Routledge).
Braham, William W. “The Intelligence of Buildings: Information and bioclimatic design.” 2024. In Kanaani, Mitra (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Smart Design Thinking in Architecture and Urbanism: For a sustainable, living planet (Routledge).
Braham, William W., Miaomiao Hou, Suryakiran Prabhakaran, and David Tilley. 2024. 'Embodied carbon in biogenic and earth materials: Accounting for the work of the biogeosphere in construction materials.' in Rahman Azari (ed.), The Routledge Handbook on Embodied Carbon in the Built Environment (Routledge).
Basunbul, Anwar Islem, and William W. Braham. 2023. "Climate responsive lessons from an architectural and ethnographic study of Hijazi traditional dwellings in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia." Frontiers in Built Environment 9. doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2023.1127615.
Ma, Nan, Alex Waegel, Max Hakkarainen, William W. Braham, Lior Glass, and Dorit Aviv. 2023. 'Blockchain + IoT sensor network to measure, evaluate and incentivize personal environmental accounting and efficient energy use in indoor spaces', Applied Energy, 332: 120443.
Braham, William W., Max Hakkarainen, Munkhbayar Buyan, Gankhuyag Janjindorj, Jay Turner, and Sunder Erdenekhuyag. 2022. 'Cooking, Heating, Insulating Products and Services (CHIPS) for Mongolian ger: Reducing energy, cost, and indoor air pollution', Energy for Sustainable Development, 71: 462-79.
Hou, Miaomiao, and William W. Braham. 2021. "Land development in an urban megalopolis: A holistic environmental assessment of housing on Chongming Eco-island, China." Journal of Cleaner Production.
Ma, Nan, Liang Chen, Jian Hu, Paris Perdikaris, William W. Braham. 2021. “Adaptive behavior and the different thermal experiences of real people: A Bayesian neural network approach to thermal preference prediction and classification.” Building and Environment 198. 2021 Best Paper Award.
Ma, Nan, Max Hakkarainen, Miaomiao Hou, Dorit Aviv, and William W. Braham. 2022. 'Impacts of building envelope design on indoor ozone exposures and health risks in urban environments', Indoor + built environment, 31: 2499-514.
Ma, Nan, Dorit Aviv, Hongshan Guo, and William W. Braham. 2021. "Measuring the right factors: A review of variables and models for thermal comfort and indoor air quality." Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 135:110436. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2020.110436.
Braham, William. 2020. "Searching for a “Bioclimatic Law” in Architecture: Comfort and the Ethics of (Human) Performance." In The Routledge companion to paradigms of performativity in design and architecture, edited by Mitra Kanaani. New York: Routledge.
Braham, William W., and Jae Min Lee. 2020. "Metabolism of Urban Location: Travel Time and the Morphology of Cities." Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 2. doi: 10.3389/frsc.2020.00004
Lee, Jae Min, and William W. Braham. 2020. "Measuring public service quality: Revisiting residential location choice using emergy synthesis of local governments in Pennsylvania." Cities 102:102753. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102753.
Braham, William W., Jae Min Lee, Evan Oskierko-Jeznacki, Barry Silverman, and Nasrin Khansari. 2019. "Spatial concentration of urban assets in the Philadelphia region: An emergy synthesis." Ecological Modelling 401:52-68. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2019.03.016.
Braham, William W. “Regenerative Architecture,” 2019. Sustainability is Dead: Re-generation in Architecture. School of Architecture, edited by Richard Graves. University of Minnesota.
Braham, William W. “Cities are Grown in Soil,” 2018. In Ecology+Design Strategies to Solve Complex Problems. Pennsylvania State University.
Shen, Pengyuan, William Braham, Yunkyu Yi, and Eric Eaton. 2019. "Rapid multi-objective optimization with multi-year future weather condition and decision-making support for building retrofit." Energy 172:892-912. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2019.01.164.
Shen, Pengyuan, William Braham, and Yunkyu Yi. 2019. "The feasibility and importance of considering climate change impacts in building retrofit analysis." Applied Energy 233-234:254-270. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.10.041.
Lee, Jae Min, and William Braham. 2019. "Right-Sizing Cities for Maximum Power: Urban Form Parameters for New York City and the Greater Philadelphia Region." Sustainability 11 (8):2352. doi: 10.3390/su11082352
Yi, Hwang, Ravi S. Srinivasan, William W. Braham, and David R. Tilley. 2017. "An ecological understanding of net-zero energy building: Evaluation of sustainability based on emergy theory." Journal of Cleaner Production 143:654-671. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.12.059.
Shen, Pengyuan, William Braham, and Yunkyu Yi. 2018. "Development of a lightweight building simulation tool using simplified zone thermal coupling for fast parametric study." Applied Energy 223:188-214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.04.039.
Yi, Hwang, William W. Braham, David R. Tilley, and Ravi Srinivasan. 2017. "A metabolic network approach to building performance: Information building modeling and simulation of biological indicators." Journal of Cleaner Production 165:1133-1162. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.07.082.
Yi, Hwang, William W. Braham, David R. Tilley, and Ravi Srinivasan. 2017. "Measuring ecological characteristics of environmental building performance: Suggestion of an information-network model and indices to quantify complexity, power, and sustainability of energetic organization." Ecological Indicators 83:201-217. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2017.07.056.
Lee, Jae Min, and William W. Braham. 2017. "Building emergy analysis of Manhattan: Density parameters for high-density and high-rise developments." Ecological Modelling 363:157-171. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2017.08.014.
Yi, Hwang, Ravi S. Srinivasan, and William W. Braham. 2015. "An integrated energy–emergy approach to building form optimization: Use of EnergyPlus, emergy analysis and Taguchi-regression method." Building and Environment 84:89-104. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2014.10.013.
Yi, Hwang, and William W. Braham. 2015. "Uncertainty characterization of building emergy analysis (BEmA)." Building and Environment 92:538-558. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2015.05.007.
Srinivasan, Ravi S., William W. Braham, Daniel E. Campbell, and Charlie D. Curcija. 2012. "Re(De)fining Net Zero Energy: Renewable Emergy Balance in environmental building design." Building and Environment 47:300-315. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2011.07.010.
