We are happy to announce that Felix Heisel will give the keynote speech at our Symposium on September 22 Regenerative Metropolis.
Felix Heisel is Assistant Professor and the Director of the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. He is a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and a graduate field member in architecture, systems engineering and matter design computation. Heisel is a licensed architect in Germany and partner of 2hs Architekten und Ingenieur PartGmbB, an office specialized in the development of circular prototypologies.
Heisel’s scholarship focuses on a systemic redesign of the built environment as a material depot of endless use and reconfiguration. He has received various awards for his work and published several books and articles on the topic, including Building Better- Less – Different: Circular Construction and Circular Economy (Birkhäuser, 2022); Urban Mining und kreislaufgerechtes Bauen (Urban Mining and Circular Construction, Fraunhofer IRB, 2021); Cultivated Building Materials (Birkhäuser, 2017), and Building from Waste (Birkhäuser, 2014).
Heisel graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts and has been teaching and researching at universities around the world, including the Berlage Institute; the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction, and City Developments; the Future Cities Laboratory Singapore; ETH Zürich; and Harvard GSD.
The Circular Construction Lab (CCL) at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning houses a design research program that advances the paradigm shift from linear material consumption towards a circular economy within an industrialized construction industry. At the intersection of architecture, engineering, material and computer science, as well as economics, the lab investigates new concepts, methods, and processes to (1) design and construct buildings as the material depots for future construction, and (2) activate the potential of the built environment as an ‘urban mine’ for today’s construction. CCL understands architecture as part of a regenerative and restorative cycle and sees design as a vehicle that can advance this ambition with excellence in teaching and research. Through close collaborations with academic, industrial, and legislative/ political partners the lab ensures the relevance of its work and promotes the direct and full-scale implementation of research results towards a more sustainable, low/ no-carbon, circular construction industry.
