Stuart Weitzman School of Design
102 Meyerson Hall
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Frederick Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, today announced that Billie Faircloth, a partner at KieranTimberlake, will speak at the 2018 Awards Ceremony, and David Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus and senior advisor to the president of Oberlin College, will speak at the School’s Commencement Exercises.
“From climate change to deepening social divides, communities around the world face unprecedented challenges, and design has the tools to address them. Billie and David have been at the very forefront of this work,” said Dean Steiner. The author of 18 books on ecological design, including Making Plans: How to Engage with Landscape, Design, and the Urban Environment (UT Press, 2018), he helped establish the Sustainable SITES Initiative, the first program of its kind to offer a systematic, comprehensive rating system designed to define sustainable land development and management.
Faircloth has taught at PennDesign since 2011, and Orr earned a PhD in International Relations/Political Science from Penn in 1973.
The PennDesign Awards Ceremony takes place on Saturday, May 12, and Commencement Exercises are held on Sunday, May 13. Both events are ticketed and open only to graduates and limited guests.
Billie Faircloth, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, 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, Faircloth fosters collaboration between disciplines, trades, academies, and industries in order to define a relevant problem-solving boundary for the built environment. She 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. In her professional and academic research, she is constantly pursuing an answer to the question: “Why do we build the way that we do?” Prior to joining KieranTimberlake, Faircloth was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, where she taught research studios exploring applications for conventional and emerging material technologies and conducted seminars on emerging construction and fabrication technologies. In addition to PennDesign, she has taught at Harvard University and served as Portman Visiting Critic at Georgia Institute of Technology and VELUX Visiting Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She is the author of Plastics Now: On Architecture’s Relationship to a Continuously Emerging Material (Routledge, 2015) and the recipient of Architectural Record ’s 2017 Women in Architecture Innovator Award.
David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus, at Oberlin College. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin for 10 years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. Orr served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and is on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He is currently a trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded eight honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January of 2016. He is one of the founders of the journal Solutions.
Media Contact: Michael Grant, director of communications, mrgrant@design.upenn.edu or 215.898.2539.
About PennDesign
The mission of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design is to prepare students to address complex sociocultural and environmental issues through thoughtful inquiry, creative expression, and innovation. As a diverse community of scholars and practitioners, we are committed to advancing the public good–both locally and globally–through art, design, planning, and preservation.