Built Buildings Lab is a collaboration between Lori Ferriss and Billie Faircloth. Lori and Billie met as consecutive chairs of the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment (AIA COTE), where they discovered a shared commitment to existing buildings and their representation in climate action and climate justice discourse. Billie and Lori are leveraging their combined 45 years of experience pursuing practice innovation with communities and institutions to address this urgent gap in climate mitigation and adaptation solutions.
our team.
Lori Ferriss, AIA, PE
Co-Founder and Executive Director
Lori Ferriss is an internationally recognized expert in leveraging existing and historic buildings toward a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future. Her award-winning work as an architect, structural engineer, conservator, and educator combines broad policy development with deep technical insights to harness the existing built environment as a climate solution. As a Principal at Boston-based design firm Goody Clancy, she founded the Regenerative Renewal practice that re-envisions architecture at the intersection of decarbonization and heritage. She is a co-developer of Architecture 2030’s CARE Tool, which estimates the carbon benefits of reusing and retrofitting buildings.
The AIA recognized Lori with the Young Architect Award for expanding the role of architects while elevating building reuse as a prime strategy to combat climate change. Lori has served as a Design Research and Teaching Fellow with Northeastern University and has taught as an adjunct at the University of Washington. She was the 2023 Chair of the AIA Committee on the Environment and serves as a Steering Committee representative of the Climate Heritage Network, a founding Co-Chair of the Zero Net Carbon Collaboration for Existing and Historic Buildings, an expert member on the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Energy, Sustainability and Climate Change, and a Senior Fellow of Architecture 2030.
Billie Faircloth, FAIA
Co-Founder and Research Director
Billie Faircloth is a design leader, educator, and transdisciplinarian who has transformed practice-integrated research and earned a national and international reputation for demonstrating its value, methods, and outcomes. As former partner and research director at the Philadelphia-based architectural practice KieranTimberlake, 2008 to 2024, Faircloth guided the collaborative development of award-winning architecture, planning, and research projects, including TallyLCA, which provides designers with an actionable understanding of the embodied environmental impacts of buildings.
Architectural Record celebrated Faircloth's relentless pioneering of transdisciplinary practice-based research when it selected her as its 2017 Women in Architecture Innovator Award winner. Faircloth is currently on the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Building Transparency. She previously served on the AIA Committee on the Environment and was its Chair in 2022. She also served the International Union of Architects (UIA) World Congress of Architects by co-convening the Design for Climate Adaptation science track between 2020 - 2023. Faircloth will join Cornell University in 2025 as an associate professor in the Department of Architecture and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.